How does your behaviour change your thoughts?
A digital nudge to counter confirmation bias

How do you incentivise regular readers on the Internet to do more fact-checking for themselves? Researchers, Calum Thornhill, Quentin Meeus, Jeroen Peperkamp and Bettina Berendt look for the answer to that question by proposing the use of nudges. They discuss two types of nudging strategies, by presentation and by information.

They use the tool BalancedView, a proof-of-concept that shows news stories relevant to a tweet. The method presents the user with a selection of articles from a range of reputable news sources providing alternative opinions from the whole political spectrum, with these alternative articles identified as matching the original one by a combination of natural language processing and search. The results suggest that nudging by information may change the behavior of users towards that of informed news readers.

In order to help our users explore the other side of the coin, we introduced filtering by the agreements— disagreement spectrum. Our users focus on topics instead of who has written them which opens a much wider horizon for them to see what everyone says on the topic irrespective of which club they belong to.

A field trial of privacy nudges for Facebook

Who hasn’t regretted some of their past online comments? Keep calm, you’re not alone! Researchers, Wang, Y., Leon, P. G., Acquisti, A., Cranor, L. F., Forget, A., & Sadeh, N. (2014) designed and implemented two modifications to the Facebook web interface that nudge users to consider the content and audience of their online disclosures more carefully. They analysed participants’ interactions with the nudges, the content of their posts, and opinions collected through surveys. They found that reminders about the audience of posts can prevent unintended disclosures without major burden.

We’re on a similar wavelength with these researchers when it comes to nudging our users about offensive language for one. Multytude uses Perspective API (powered by AI) to inform users about how likely offensive their comment is before they post. According to Perspective’s own research, 44.7% of users replaced or removed offensive words once they got the ‘nudge’.
['Hatice Ugurel']
['Behavioral Science', 'Nudge Theory', 'Conversation', 'Discussion', 'Social Media']