Pano: Engaging with News using Moral Framing towards Bridging Ideological Divides
Society is showing signs of strong ideological polarization. When pushed to seek perspectives different from their own, people often reject diverse ideas or find them unfathomable. Work has shown that framing controversial issues using the values of the audience can improve reception of opposing views. In this paper, we present Pano, an interactive system motivated by moral framing theory that educates news consumers to think in a framework of fundamental human values. Pano encourages users to challenge their understanding of opposing views through collaborative annotation and discussion of moral framing in articles and comments. We describe two iterations of Pano – the first covering a suite of ways to interact with news, and the second tailored toward annotation and discussion. We find that compared to a control, Pano users more often empathize with and re-frame arguments in the moral values of the opposing side, showing promise toward the ultimate goal of bridging the ideological divide.
READ FULL TEXT