Because of the increasingly negative impacts of the echo chamber effect, such as the dissemination of fake news and political polarization occurring in social networking services (SNSs), considerable efforts are being made to mitigate this effect. Prior HCI studies have presented the development of user interfaces to display information that reflects various standpoints, with the aim of nudging people to consume information in a more objective fashion. However, these efforts still lack the ability to highlight the characteristics, generation processes, and negative effects of echo chambers, so they may not be effective in helping people become sufficiently aware of the echo chamber effect and those who are already in an echo chamber. In this paper, we present ChamberBreaker (CB), which has been designed to help increase a player's awareness of and preemptively respond to an echo chamber effect based on psychological concepts: inoculation, heuristics for judging, and gamification. Through a user study with 882 participants (control group: 446, experimental group: 436), we demonstrated the feasibility of our game-based methodology to support the awareness of the echo chamber effect and the importance of maintaining diverse perspectives when consuming information. Our findings highlight the externalization of psychological standpoints in mitigating an echo chamber effect and suggest design implications for system development---the consideration of demographics, playing time, and the connection to fake news recognition---for digital literacy education. You can play CB at http://tiny.cc/chamberbreaker (The game only works with Chrome.)
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.