Designing for Engaging with News using Moral Framing towards Bridging Ideological Divides

TL;DR

This paper explores designing news engagement systems that use moral framing to bridge ideological divides, involving user interaction with moral annotations and discussions, evaluated through a field study with 71 participants.

Contribution

It introduces novel features for moral framing in news systems and evaluates their effectiveness in promoting understanding of opposing views.

Findings

Participants learned to reframe discourse using opposing moral values.

Design features increased engagement with moral framing.

System designs facilitated better understanding of ideological differences.

Abstract

Society is showing signs of strong ideological polarization. When pushed to seek perspectives different from their own, people often reject diverse ideas or find them unfathomable. Work has shown that framing controversial issues using the values of the audience can improve understanding of opposing views. In this paper, we present our work designing systems for addressing ideological division through educating U.S. news consumers to engage using a framework of fundamental human values known as Moral Foundations. We design and implement a series of new features that encourage users to challenge their understanding of opposing views, including annotation of moral frames in news articles, discussion of those frames via inline comments, and recommendations based on relevant moral frames. We describe two versions of features -- the first covering a suite of ways to interact with moral framing in news, and the second tailored towards collaborative annotation and discussion. We conduct a field evaluation of each design iteration with 71 participants in total over a period of 6-8 days, finding evidence suggesting users learned to re-frame their discourse in moral values of the opposing side. Our work provides several design considerations for building systems to engage with moral framing.