The Ethics of a Recommendation System

In this paper, we extend the current research in the recommendation system community by showing that users’ did attach ethical utility to items. In an experiment (N = 111) that manipulated several moral factors regarding the potentially harmful contents in movies, books and games, users were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of recommending these items to teenagers and dating couples (adults). Results confirmed with previous studies that gender plays a key role in making moral judgment especially regarding the ethical appropriateness of an item. The study further identifies degrees of aversion regarding the appeal of these elements in media for ethical recommendations. Based on the study, we propose a user-initiated ethical recommender system to help users pick up morally appropriate items during the post-recommendation process. We believe that the ethical appropriateness of items perceived by end users could predict the trust and credibility of the system