Bibliographic record
Abstract
Currently, there is widespread media coverage about the problems with 'fake news' that appears in social media, but the effects of biased information that appears in search engine results is also increasing. The authors argue that the search engine results page (SERP) exposes three important types of bias: source bias, algorithmic bias, and cognitive bias. To explore the relationship between these three types of bias, we conducted a mixed methods study with sixty participants (plus fourteen in a pilot to make a total of seventy-four participants). Within a library setting, participants were provided with mock search engine pages that presented order-controlled sources on a science controversy. Participants were then asked to rank the sources' usefulness and then summarize the controversy. We found that participants ranked the usefulness of sources depending on its presentation within a SERP. In turn, this also influenced how the participants summarized the topic. We attribute the differences in the participants' writings to the cognitive biases that affect a user's judgment when selecting sources on a SERP. We identify four main cognitive biases that a SERP can evoke in students: Priming, Anchoring, Framing, and the Availability Heuristic. While policing information quality is a quixotic task, changes can be made to both SERPs and a user's decision-making when selecting sources. As bias emerges both on the system side and the user side of search, we suggest a two-fold solution is required to address these challenges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.195 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".