Sean A. Munson

23 October 2012, 6:30-8:00p
Pacific Science Center

The Internet gives individuals more choice in political news and information sources and more tools to filter out disagreeable information. Citing the preference described by selective exposure theory — that people prefer information that supports their beliefs and avoid counter-attitudinal information — observers warn that people may use these tools to access and create ideological echo chambers, increasing the polarization of different political groups and decreasing society's ability to solve problems.

My dissertation work studies political information exposure in two types of online spaces. First, it describes individuals' preferences for the range of political opinions news aggregators present, ways to measure the diversity of exposure in those spaces, and selection and presentation techniques for increasing the diversity of exposure. Second, it discusses non-political spaces, where preferences other than politics shape people's behavior, but where people may still serendipitously encounter political information.

This work contributes to both understanding and building. First, addressing mixed results within the selective exposure literature, it finds that people are neither inherently challenge-averse nor inherently diversity seeking; there are individual differences. It also finds substantial political discussion on non-political blogs, where people may have serendipitous encounters with diverse views. Moreover, blog readers do not treat these posts as taboo and they engage with the posts' political content. Serendipitous encounters with mixed viewpoints will still happen, even if not in news aggregators.

For designers and builders of online political news tools, and other applications, the dissertation proposes diversity metrics including inclusion, alienation, and representation scores. It also describes and presents an evaluation of the Sidelines algorithm, designed to select diverse collections from user votes. Finally, it describes a design space for visualizations intended to nudge people to read more balanced or diverse sets of news, an evaluation of two such techniques, and a research design for field evaluation of further presentation techniques.

Resources: Dissertation · Refs · Slides · Balancer Extension · Archived event video

• Paul Resnick
• Daniel Xiaodan Zhou
• Jeremy Canfield
• Erica Willar
• Emily Rosengren
• Cat Hong Le
• Brian Ford
• Peter Andrews
• Sidharth Chhabra
• Stephanie Lee

• NSF award #IIS-0916099
• Yahoo! Key Technical Challenges grant
• Intel PhD Fellowship