Attention allocation in information-rich environments:the case of news aggregators

News aggregators have emerged as an important component of digital content ecosystems, attracting traffic by hosting curated collections of links to third party content, but also inciting conflict with content producers. Aggregators provide titles and short summaries (snippets) of articles they link to. Content producers claim that their presence deprives them of traffic that would otherwise flow to their sites. In light of this controversy, we conduct a series of field experiments whose objective is to provide insight with respect to how readers allocate their attention between a news aggregator and the original articles it links to. Our experiments are based on manipulating elements of the user interface of a Swiss mobile news aggregator. We examine how key design parameters, such as the length of the text snippet that an aggregator displays about articles, the presence of associated images, and the number of related articles on the same story, affect a reader’s propensity to visit the content producer's site and read the full article. Our findings suggest the presence of a substitution relationship between the amount of information that aggregators offer about articles and the probability that readers will opt to read the full articles at the content producer sites. Interestingly, however, when several related article outlines compete for user attention, a longer snippet and the inclusion of an image increase the probability that an article will be chosen over its competitors

The Effects of Online Advertisements and News Images on News Reception

The news and advertising industries have a symbiotic relationship. News media bring audiences to advertisers, and advertisers provide the necessary funding for the survival of the news media. This inseparable relationship between the news and advertising industries continues to exist in the era of the Internet when various newly developed techniques are used to attract online newsreaders\u27 attention. This raises the questions of whether exposure to online news and advertisements simultaneously has a negative impact on acquiring information from the news and whether the negative impact, if there is any, can be mitigated by motivating newsreaders to engage in news reading through including news images that attract newsreaders\u27 attention. To answer theses question, an online experiment was conducted. It had a 3 (Online Advertisements: None vs. Static Banners vs. Animated Banners) X 2 (News Images: None vs. Human Suffering) between-subject design. The findings indicate that online advertisements may reduce readers\u27 attention to news. Moreover, they suggest that news images depicting human suffering may mitigate the negative effect of online advertisements on news processing under some circumstances. Simultaneously processing news images and online advertisements may also cause cognitive overload that suppresses news processing. This implies that including news images increases knowledge acquisition only to the extent that newsreaders have enough resources available to process the information from news. From practical perspectives, the findings shed light on what news reporters and editors may consider when designing online news websites

Nonprobative Photos Inflate the Truthiness and Falsiness of Claims

When people evaluate claims they often rely on what comedian Stephen Colbert calls truthiness, judging claims using subjective feelings of truth, rather than drawing on facts. Over seven experiments I examined how nonprobative photos can manufacture truthiness in just a few seconds. I found that a quick exposure to a photo that relates to, but does not provide any probative evidence about the accuracy of claims can systematically bias people to conclude claims are true. In Experiments 1A and 1B, people saw familiar and unfamiliar celebrity names and, for each, quickly responded "true" or "false" to the claim "This famous person is alive" or (between subjects) "This famous person is dead." Within subjects, some names appeared with a photo of the celebrity engaged in his/her profession whereas other names appeared alone. For unfamiliar celebrity names, photos increased the likelihood that subjects judged the claim to be true. Moreover, the same photos inflated the truth of "Alive" and "Dead" claims, suggesting that photos did not produce an "alive bias," but a "truth bias." Experiment 2 showed that photos and verbal information similarly inflated truthiness, suggesting that the effect is not peculiar to photographs per se. Experiment 3 demonstrated that nonprobative photos can also enhance the truthiness of general knowledge claims (Giraffes are the only mammals that cannot jump). In Experiments 4-6 I examined boundary conditions for truthiness. I found that the semantic relationship between the photo and claim mattered. Experiment 4 showed that in a within-subject design, related photos produced truthiness, but unrelated photos acted just like the no photo condition. But unrelated photos were not always benign, Experiment 5 showed that their effects depended on experimental context. In a mixed design, related photos produced truthiness and unrelated photos produced falsiness. Although the effect of related photos was robust across materials and variation in experimental context, when I used a fully between-subjects design in Experiment 6, the effect of photos (related and unrelated) was eliminated. These effects add to a growing literature on how nonprobative information can influence people’s decisions and suggest that nonprobative photographs do more than simply decorate, they can rapidly manufacture feelings of truth. As with many effects in the cognitive psychology literature, the photo-truthiness effect depends on the way in which people process and interpret photos when evaluating the truth of claims

Designing technologies for exposure to diverse opinions

Exposure to diverse opinions can help individuals develop accurate beliefs, make better decisions, and become more understanding and tolerant persons. It is also necessary for the governance of a stable and democratic society. However, the exposure is often limited by people's natural tendency towards selective exposure—preferential seeking of confirmatory over challenging information. This has prompted many scholars to warn about the rise of "echo chambers" and "filter bubbles" online, with individuals' easy control over information exposure enabled by digital technologies. Such concern has motivated HCI researchers to study a class of diversity-enhancing technologies—information and social technologies that host diverse viewpoints and take increasing users' exposure to information that challenges their existing beliefs as a design goal. In this dissertation, I seek to answer the following question: What kind of design features can nudge users to be exposed to more attitude-challenging information? To complement the current technical-HCI approaches, I focus on bridging social science theories on selective exposure and design guidelines for diversity-enhancing technologies. Specifically, the central objective of this dissertation is to understand the key factors that moderate individuals' propensity to engage in selective exposure in interacting with information and social technologies and apply the knowledge in four aspects of diversity-enhancing technology design: 1) design by enabling the moderators that reduce, and eliminating ones that increase, selective exposure; 2) design for personalization by identifying user groups and use contexts that have varied selective exposure tendencies; 3) design for personalization by tailoring diversity-enhancing designs based on the underlying individual differences; and 4) design beyond individuals by considering the opinion group differences in selective exposure tendencies and the implication for user behaviors and social network structure. This dissertation provides empirical evidence that user behaviors in seeking attitude-relevant information are subject to the influence of various individual and contextual factors and recommends a more personalized approach that carefully controls and leverages these factors to nudge users into more desirable information consumption. It contributes several new lessons for designing technologies that present diverse viewpoints, including a theory-driven guideline for personalizing diversity-enhancing designs, insights on the selective exposure bias in consumer health information seeking, and an exploration of group selective exposure and its implication for social technology design. Perhaps most importantly, the dissertation pinpoints several directions in which selective exposure theories can be applied to the design of diversity-enhancing technologies, which opens up opportunities for developing a unified knowledge framework to push this research field forward