Understanding and Navigating Biases in Information Behaviour to Facilitate (better) Online Choices

Every day, individuals make numerous decisions online, ranging from selecting their meals, entertainment, or purchases to managing their finances or responding to healthcare scenarios. These decisions may be made instinctively or after careful deliberation, and can occasionally necessitate the balancing of multiple personal objectives. In this talk, I will discuss how the process of decision-making for various types of choices share similar underlying mechanisms. Drawing on my own research on search and recommendation systems, I will illustrate that these different types of choices are vulnerable to diverse biases, which can vary across situations and users. The central idea of the talk is that understanding the biases involved and their effects can aid in designing information systems that avoid or leverage these biases to encourage user behaviours that align with their objectives.