American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, Vista, CA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2024 Sep 12;19(9):e0309897. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0309897. eCollection 2024.
In recent years, powerful new forms of influence have been discovered that the internet has made possible. In the present paper, we introduce another new form of influence which we call the "opinion matching effect" (OME). Many websites now promise to help people form opinions about products, political candidates, and political parties by first administering a short quiz and then informing people how closely their answers match product characteristics or the views of a candidate or party. But what if the matching algorithm is biased? We first present data from real opinion matching websites, showing that responding at random to their online quizzes can produce significantly higher proportions of recommendations for one political party or ideology than one would expect by chance. We then describe a randomized, controlled, counterbalanced, double-blind experiment that measured the possible impact of this type of matching on the voting preferences of real, undecided voters. With data obtained from a politically diverse sample of 773 eligible US voters, we observed substantial shifts in voting preferences toward our quiz's favored candidate-between 51% and 95% of the number of people who had supported that candidate before we administered and scored the quiz. These shifts occurred without any participants showing any awareness of having been manipulated. In summary, in the present study we show not only that OME is a large effect; we also show that biased online questionnaires exist that might be shifting people's opinions without their knowledge.
近年来，互联网带来了许多强大的新形式的影响。在本文中，我们引入了另一种新的影响形式，我们称之为“观点匹配效应”（OME）。现在许多网站都承诺通过首先进行简短的测验，然后告知人们他们的答案与产品特征或候选人或政党的观点有多接近，来帮助人们形成对产品、政治候选人以及政党的意见。但是，如果匹配算法存在偏见怎么办？我们首先展示了来自真实的观点匹配网站的数据，这些数据表明，随机回答他们的在线测验可以产生比人们预期的更高比例的对一个政党或意识形态的推荐。然后，我们描述了一个随机、对照、平衡、双盲实验，该实验测量了这种类型的匹配对真实、未决定的选民投票偏好的可能影响。我们从一个政治多样化的 773 名合格美国选民样本中获得的数据表明，在我们进行测验和评分之前，有相当大的投票偏好转向了我们测验中支持的候选人，支持该候选人的人数增加了 51%到 95%。这些转变是在没有任何参与者表现出被操纵的意识的情况下发生的。总之，在本研究中，我们不仅表明 OME 是一个大的影响，而且还表明存在有偏见的在线问卷，这些问卷可能在人们不知情的情况下改变他们的意见。
