Toxic text in personas: An experiment on user perceptions

• Autor(a) principal: Salminen, J.
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Jung, S. - G., Santos, J. M., Jansen, B. J.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/24585
• topic: Personas; Toxicity; Social media; User experiment

When algorithms create personas from social media data, the personas can become noxious via automatically including toxic comments. To investigate how users perceive such personas, we conducted a 2 × 2 user experiment with 496 participants that showed participants toxic and non-toxic versions of data-driven personas. We found that participants gave higher credibility, likability, empathy, similarity, and willingness-to-use scores to non-toxic personas. Also, gender affected toxicity perceptions in that female toxic data-driven personas scored lower in likability, empathy, and similarity than their male counterparts. Female participants gave higher perceptions scores to non-toxic personas and lower scores to toxic personas than male participants. We discuss implications from our research for designing data-driven personas.