The ethics of a recommendation system

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Abstract

In this paper, we extend the current research in the recommendation system community by showing that users’ did attach ethical utility to items. In an experiment (N = 111) that manipulated several moral factors regarding the potentially harmful contents in movies, books and games, users were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of recommending these items to teenagers and dating couples (adults). Results confirmed with previous studies that gender plays a key role in making moral judgment especially regarding the ethical appropriateness of an item. The study further identifies degrees of aversion regarding the appeal of these elements in media for ethical recommendations. Based on the study, we propose a user-initiated ethical recommender system to help users pick up morally appropriate items during the post-recommendation process. We believe that the ethical appropriateness of items perceived by end users could predict the trust and credibility of the system.

Publication Title

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

First Page Number

287

Last Page Number

298

DOI

10.1007/978-3-319-11538-2_26

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS