A Real-Life School Study of Confirmation Bias and Polarisation in Information Behaviour

When people engage in Social Networking Sites, they influence one another through their contributions. Prior research suggests that the interplay between individual differences and environmental variables, such as a person’s openness to conflicting information, can give rise to either public spheres or echo chambers. In this work, we aim to unravel critical processes of this interplay in the context of learning. In particular, we observe high school students’ information behavior (search and evaluation of Web resources) to better understand a potential coupling between confirmatory search and polarization and, in further consequence, improve learning analytics and information services for individual and collective search in learning scenarios. In an empirical study, we had 91 high school students performing an information search in a social bookmarking environment. Gathered log data was used to compute indices of confirmatory search and polarisation as well as to analyze the impact of social stimulation. We find confirmatory search and polarization to correlate positively and social stimulation to mitigate, i.e., reduce the two variables’ relationship. From these findings, we derive practical implications for future work that aims to refine our formalism to compute confirmatory search and polarisation indices and to apply it for depolarizing information services.