Toxic Text in Personas: An Experiment on User Perceptions

Authors

Joni Salminen, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU; and Turku School of Economics, State of QatarFollow
Soon-Gyo Jung, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, QatarFollow
João M. Santos, Instituto Universitário de LisboaFollow
Bernard J. Jansen, Qatar Computing Research InstituteFollow

Abstract

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.

DOI

10.17705/1thci.00157

Recommended Citation

Salminen, J., Jung, S., Santos, J. M., & Jansen, B. J. (2021). Toxic Text in Personas: An Experiment on User Perceptions. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 13(4), 453-478. https://doi.org/10.17705/1thci.00157
DOI: 10.17705/1thci.00157