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

Simone Kopeinik*, Elisabeth Lex, Dominik Kowald, Dietrich Albert, Paul Seitlinger

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference paperpeer-review

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTransforming Learning with Meaningful Technologies - 14th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2019, Proceedings
EditorsMaren Scheffel, Julien Broisin, Viktoria Pammer-Schindler, Andri Ioannou, Jan Schneider
PublisherSpringer-Verlag Italia
Pages409-422
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9783030297350
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2019
Event14th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, Transforming Learning With Meaningful Technologies: EC-TEL 2019 - Delft, Netherlands
Duration: 16 Sept 201919 Sept 2019
Conference number: 14
http://www.ec-tel.eu/
http://www.ec-tel.eu/index.php?id=918

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11722 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference14th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, Transforming Learning With Meaningful Technologies
Abbreviated titleEC-TEL 2019
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityDelft
Period16/09/1919/09/19
Internet address

Keywords

  • Confirmatory search
  • Information behaviour
  • Learning analytics
  • Polarisation
  • Real-life school study

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computer Science(all)

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