I have a piece up at The Atlantic (went up Friday) titled “The Future of Media Bias” that I hope you’ll read. I suppose the title is deliberately misleading, since the topic isn’t media bias in the typical sense. Here’s the premise:
Context can affect bias, and on the Web — if I can riff on Lessig — code is context. So why not design media that accounts for the user’s biases and helps him overcome them?
Head over to The Atlantic to read it. In the meantime, I want to expand a bit on some of my ideas.
1) This is not just about pop-up ads. The conceit of the post is visiting a conservative friend’s site and being hit with red-meat pop-ups that act as priming mechanisms. But that was just a way of introducing my point. (Evidence from comments and Twitter suggest this may have distracted some.) So while pop-ups can illustrate the above premise, the premise is in no way restricted to the impacts of pop-ups either as they exist in practice to sell ads or as they might be used in theory.
2) More on self-affirmation. I might have been clearer on how self-affirmation exercises work. Although they were not described in detail in either paper I referenced. Here’s how I understand them: you’re asked to select a value that is important to your self-worth – maybe something like honesty – and then you write a few sentences about how you live by that value. Writing out a few sentences about what an honest and therefore valuable person you are makes you less worried about information threatening your self-worth.
I want to address a few potential objections to embedding an exercise like this in media. One might argue that no one would complete the exercise (I’m imagining it as a pop-up right now.) Perhaps. But you could incentivize it. Perhaps anyone who completes it gets their comments displayed higher or something like that. Build incentives into a community reputation system. Second objection is that maybe you could get people to complete it once, but it’s impractical to think anyone would do it before every article. Fair point. But perhaps you just need people to do it once, and then it’s just displayed alongside or above the content, for the reader to view, to prime them. Finally, I want to note that this is just one random example and I don’t think my argument really rides too much on it. The reason I used it was a) there was lots of good research behind it and b) it fit nicely with the pop-up conceit of the post.
3) More examples. One paper I referenced re: global warming suggests that the headline can impact susceptibility to confirmation/disconfirmation biases. So what if the headline changed depending on the user’s biases? This would be tricky in various ways, but it’s hardly inconceivable. In fact I wish I’d mentioned it since in some ways it seems more practical than the self-confirmation exercises. It would, however, introduce a lot of new difficulties into the headline writing process.
Another thing I might have mentioned is the ordering of content. Imagine you’re looking at a Room for Debate at NYT. Which post should you see first? In the course of researching the Atlantic piece, I came across some evidence that the order you receive information matters (with the first piece being privileged) but I’m having trouble finding where I saw that now. And it’s not obvious that that kind of effect would persist in cases of political information. But, still, there may well be room to explore ordering as a mechanism for dealing with bias.
Finally – and at this point I’m working off of no research and just thinking out loud – what if you established the author’s credibility by showing the work the user was most likely to agree with, in cases of disconfirmation bias (and the reverse in confirmation bias cases)? So, say I’m reading about climate change and you knew I’d be biased against evidence for it. But the author making the case for that evidence wrote something last week that I do agree with, that does fit my worldview. What if a teaser for that piece was displayed alongside the global warming content? Would that help?
I’ve also wondered if asking users to solve fairly simple math problems would prime them to think more rationally, but again, that’s not anything based on research; just a thought.
So that’s it. A few clarifications and some extra thoughts. To me, the hope of this piece would be to inject the basic idea into the dialogue, so that researchers start to think of media as an avenue for testing their theories, and so that designers, coders, journalists, etc. start thinking of this research as input for innovation into how they create new media.
UPDATE: One more cool one I forgot to mention… there’s some evidence that hitting someone with graphical information more forcefully makes a point, such that it would basically take too much mental energy to rationalize around it. You can read more about that here. This column in the Boston Globe refers to a study concluding – in the columnist’s words – “people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas.” This strikes me as along the same lines as the graph experiment. And so these are things to keep in mind as well.
beyond the times 