CommSense: Facilitating Bias-Aware and Reflective Navigation of Online Comments for Rational Judgment

TL;DR

CommSense is a tool designed to improve online comment navigation by reducing biases and promoting reflective reasoning, thereby helping users form more rational judgments through interface design and real-time prompts.

Contribution

This paper introduces CommSense, a novel plugin that enhances comment engagement with visual summaries and prompts, addressing bias mitigation and reflective reasoning in online discussions.

Findings

CommSense increases bias awareness among users.

The tool promotes more comprehensive, evidence-based reasoning.

Users report high usability and improved reflection.

Abstract

Online comments significantly influence users' judgments, yet their presentation, often determined by platform algorithms, can introduce biases, such as anchoring effects, which distort reasoning. While existing research emphasizes mitigating individual cognitive biases, the evolution of user judgments during comment engagement remains overlooked. This study investigates how presentation cues impact reasoning and explores interface design strategies to mitigate bias. Through a preliminary experiment (N=18) and a co-design workshop, we identified key challenges users face across a four-stage process and distilled four design requirements: pre-engagement framing, interactive organization, reflective prompts, and synthesis support. Based on these insights, we developed CommSense, an on-the-fly plugin that enhances user engagement with online comments by providing visual overviews and lightweight prompts to guide reasoning. A between-subject evaluation (N=24) demonstrates that CommSense improves bias awareness and reflective thinking, helping users produce more comprehensive, evidence-based rationales while maintaining high usability.