Tutorial Introduction

While algorithmic biases and fairness has been widely discussed in mainstream computing research, how hidden human biases affect users' judgments and interaction experiences still remain understudied in information seeking and retrieval. This half-day tutorial will provide a starting point for researchers seeking to learn more about searching under uncertainty. The tutorial includes two parts. First, we will provide an introduction of the biases and heuristics program put forward by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) which assumes that people are not always rational. The second part of the tutorial will provide an overview of human biases in search, before doing a deep dive into examples and the impact of biases on varying high-stakes decisions. The tutorial will conclude with a discussion of the practical implication for how we can better design, implement, and evaluate bias-aware IR systems.

By the end of the tutorial, participants should be able to: Describe the main biases and heuristics; Explain the difference between rational and irrational behaviour (from behavioral economics perspective); Explain how different biases can impact online search behaviours and user judgments on documents; Generate hypotheses regarding user behaviour under different biases in search interactions and design appropriate experiments to test the hypotheses.