ConsensUs

Abstract

Groups often face difficulty reaching consensus. For complex decisions with multiple criteria, verbal and written discourse alone may impede groups from pinpointing and moving past fundamental disagreements. To help support consensus building, we introduce ConsensUs, a novel visualization tool that highlights disagreement by asking group members to quantify their subjective opinions across multiple criteria. To evaluate this approach, we conducted a between-subjects experiment with 87 participants on a comparative hiring task. The study compared three modes of sensemaking on a group decision: written discourse only, visualization only, and written discourse plus visualization. We confirmed that the visualization helped participants identify disagreements within the group and then measured subsequent changes to their individual opinions. The results show that disagreement highlighting led participants to align their ratings more with the opinions of other group members. While disagreement highlighting led to better score alignment, participants reported a number of reasons for shifting their score, from genuine consensus to appeasement. We discuss further research angles to understand how disagreement highlighting affects social processes and whether it produces objectively better decisions.

Something’s Brewing! Early Prediction of Controversy-causing Posts from Discussion Features

“…No, whether a topic (or entity/hashtag/word) has been controversial [a distinction also made by Addawood et al (2017)] (Popescu and Pennacchiotti, 2010;Choi et al, 2010;Cao et al, 2015;Lourentzou et al, 2015;Addawood et al, 2017;Al-Ayyoub et al, 2017;Garimella et al, 2018) No, whether a conversation contained disagreement (Mishne and Glance, 2006;Yin et al, 2012;Allen et al, 2014;Wang and Cardie, 2014) or mapping the disagreements (Awadallah et al, 2012;Marres, 2015;Borra et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2018) No, the task is, for the given textual item, predict antisocial behavior in the ensuing discussion (Zhang et al, 2018b,a), or subsequent comment volume/popularity/structure (Szabo and Huberman, 2010;Kim et al, 2011;Tatar et al, 2011;Backstrom et al, 2013;He et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2018b), or eventual post article score (Rangwala and Jamali, 2010;Szabo and Huberman, 2010),; but all where, like us, the paradigm is early detection No, only info available at the item's creation (Dori-Hacohen and Allan, 2013;Mejova et al, 2014;Klenner et al, 2014;Addawood et al, 2017;Timmermans et al, 2017;Rethmeier et al, 2018;Kaplun et al, 2018) or the entire ensuing revision/discussion history (Rad and Barbosa, 2012;. N.B.…”

Help or Hinder? Evaluating the Impact of Fairness Metrics and Algorithms in Visualizations for Consensus Ranking

“…Visualization systems have been designed to aid decision-makers in inspecting multiple stakeholders' preferences to reach a consensus decision [2,11,17,20,22,25,33,40,42,47,54,55]. A subset of these tools consider the setting, like ours, in which stakeholder preferences are encoded as rankings [11,23,33].…”

“…Visualization systems have been designed to aid decision-makers in inspecting multiple stakeholders' preferences to reach a consensus decision [2,11,17,20,22,25,33,40,42,47,54,55]. A subset of these tools consider the setting, like ours, in which stakeholder preferences are encoded as rankings [11,23,33]. Liu et al [33] evaluated a between-subjects experiment to assess the effectiveness of their proposed tool, ConsensUs, designed for multiple stakeholders to rate and select candidates.…”

“…A subset of these tools consider the setting, like ours, in which stakeholder preferences are encoded as rankings [11,23,33]. Liu et al [33] evaluated a between-subjects experiment to assess the effectiveness of their proposed tool, ConsensUs, designed for multiple stakeholders to rate and select candidates. They found that visualizations helped surface stakeholder disagreement that otherwise would have gone undetected.…”

A Learner-Centered Technique for Collectively Configuring Inputs for an Algorithmic Team Formation Tool

“…Students were instructed to be attentive to criteria with minimal peer agreement and those where their own selection differed from the selections of their peers. This workflow is based on the Delphi method for building consensus [3,27,36].…”