Behavioural science to empower truth and democratic discourse online

Public opinion is shaped in significant part by online content, the sources of which may be journalistic, but also lay, and which can spread rapidly through social media and are algorithmically curated (often non-transparent). This new and constantly evolving information ecosystem is designed by platform providers primarily to attract the attention of users, not to promote deliberate cognition and autonomous choice; information overload, finely tuned personalization and distorted social cues, in turn, pave the way for manipulation and the spread of false information. Third-party fact-checking is currently used to remedy some of these outcomes symptomatically, but due to its risk of censorship or allegations thereof, it is potentially prone to undermine trust. Here, we address the question for an alternative solution: How can online environments provide context and promote autonomy, so as to empower individuals to make informed decisions themselves? This approach potentially avoids external judgements about content, but requires the design of an environment, that allows people to become their own fact-checkers. To achieve this goal, effective web governance informed by behavioural research is critically needed. In this talk I will connect two approaches and show how the insights from computational social science on the macro-scale can be translated into practical interventions informed by the psychology of decision making on the micro-scale. More specifically, we identify technologically available yet largely untapped cues that can be harnessed to indicate the epistemic quality of online content, the factors underlying algorithmic decisions and the degree of consensus in online debates. We then map out two classes of behavioural interventions—nudging and boosting— that enlist these cues to redesign online environments for informed and autonomous choice and have the potential to collectively scale up to an improved discourse online.