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The widespread threat of contagious disease disrupts not only everyday life but also psychological experience. Building on findings regarding xenophobic responses to contagious diseases, this research investigates how perceived vulnerability to a disease moderates the psychological link between people’s xenophobic thoughts and support for ingroup-protective actions. Three datasets collected during the time of Ebola ( N = 867) and COVID-19 ( Ns = 992 and 926) measured perceived disease risk, group-serving biases (i.e., xenophobic thoughts), and support for restrictive travel policies (i.e., ingroup-protective actions). Using correlational and quasi-experimental analyses, results indicated that for people who perceive greater disease risk, the association between group-serving bias and restrictive policy support is weakened. This weakened association occurred because people who felt more vulnerable to these diseases increased support for ingroup-protective actions more strongly than xenophobic thoughts. This research underscores the importance of understanding the impact of threats on psychological processes beyond the impact on psychological outcomes.
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The Impact of More Transparent Interfaces on Behavior in Personalized Recommendation
Many interactive online systems, such as social media platforms or news sites, provide personalized experiences through recommendations or news feed customization based on people’s feedback and engagement on individual items (e.g., liking items). In this paper, we investigate how we can support a greater degree of user control in such systems by changing the way the system allows people to gauge the consequences of their feedback actions. To this end, we consider two important aspects of how the system responds to feedback actions: (i) immediacy, i.e., how quickly the system responds with an update, and (ii) visibility, i.e., whether or not changes will get highlighted. We used both an in-lab qualitative study and a large-scale crowd-sourced study to examine the impact of these factors on people’s reported preferences and observed behavioral metrics. We demonstrate that UX design which enables people to preview the impact of their actions and highlights changes results in a higher reported transparency, an overall preference for this design, and a greater selectivity in which items are liked.
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- PAR ID:
- 10170898
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR ’20)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3397271.3401117
