The polarization of ideas is a natural phenomenon of human behavior. When productive, it can generate scenarios for reflection on arguments, opinions, and interactions, but when polarization is extreme, it generates social isolation, manipulation, perception of injustice, unproductive debates, certainties of absolute truths, fanaticism, feelings of hatred, and even wars. Deconstructing the ecosystem of extreme polarization directly benefits social stability. Virtual social environments are excellent scenarios for fostering debates, negotiations, and the exposition of ideas. The objective of this study is to use the same virtual social ecosystem with its empowerment mechanisms and influence attributes to support the creation of tools, functionalities, and simulations to develop healthier systems. The knowledge generated supported the development of a design and cognitive ethical affordances practiced in metacognitive design, optimized navigation, and metacognitive simulations. The cognitive, ethical affordances incorporated into the Productive Reinforcement Spiral method model were part of a metacognitive simulation of collaborative negotiation with a productive reinforcement spiral mechanism, whose description and evaluation of the design are the main objectives of this paper.

Collaborative crowdsourcing has evolved over recent years as a problem-solving model that builds on interactions that take place within crowds or self-organizing teams that form and dissolve in response to an open call. Unlike microtasking, its effectiveness depends primarily on collective actions rather than individual efforts, particularly for non-decomposable tasks that require a certain level of interdependency. Although social news curation has gained attention as a means of empowering both citizens and journalists, there is a need to understand the components and constraints that shape this online crowdsourcing activity when mediated by artificial intelligence (AI). In response to this gap, this paper reimagines the traditional social news curation model through a design fiction prototype consisting of a personalized AI system and user-driven social curation activities. In a highly polarized opinion and political climate where propaganda, misinformation, and extreme polarization take on a dominant framing to generate social chaos, the envisioned solution seeks to model healthy and trustworthy socio-algorithmic interactions towards a more democratic and relevant form of news curation.

This paper proposes an agenda of possible solutions relevant to the challenge of polarization of extreme positions. The challenge of mitigating polarization of extreme positions has been a hot topic in politics, journalism, new media, and, more recently, in CSCW and HCI research. In this study, the main focus is to investigate the harmful effects of polarization from a neuroscience point of view. The suggested solutions are based on theories of social cognitive neuroscience and encourage awareness of inappropriate behavior, an increase in the diversity of arguments, and the exercise of individual and collective responsibility, to mitigate the problem of polarization that threatens public debate and, consequently, democracy.

Over the past decade, online crowdsourcing has established itself as an emerging paradigm that industry and government have been using to harness the cognitive abilities of a multitude of users distributed around the world. In this context, microtask crowdsourcing has become the method of choice for addressing a wide range of diverse problems. Microtasks typically require a minimum of time and cognitive effort, but combined individual efforts have made it possible to accomplish great achievements. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing effort of understanding whether the same success that microtask crowdsourcing has achieved in other domains can be obtained in the field of social news curation. In particular, we ask whether it is possible to turn online news curation, typically a social and collaborative activity on the Web, into a model in which curatorial activities are mapped into microtasks to be performed by a crowd of online users.

In recent years, social curation technology has been successfully promoted as a means of addressing the problem of involving citizens with news content. Sites like Facebook., Reddit and Storify., just to name a few, allow their users to discuss, comment., share, identify and review news content from various sources. A key goal of this paper is to analyze the process of social validation in the context of Acropolis, a social computing platform that allows citizens to build and share their own narratives about complex or long-term news stories. The sense of social validation determines an increase in self-esteem, self-confidence, and instant happiness, when conveniently engendered in virtual environments.

Acropolis is a social computing platform especially designed to engage citizens in building and sharing their own narratives about complex or long-term news stories. The first two design cycles of the platform have shown, by positive evidence, that this goal has been achieved, but in the previous papers no analysis was conducted regarding the social behavior of the participants in relation to consuming or being exposed to different viewpoints of their own. Several studies suggest that people crave more for reinforcement of opinion than they reject exposure from different points of view, and that from the standpoint of strengthening democratic discourse, hearing the other side is crucial. A key goal of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which the participants of the latest experiment in the aforementioned platform followed this behavior. Besides that, we aim to investigate whether the design of the platform favored the goal of encouraging the consumption of diverse sources and opinions, with an eye towards the next design cycles.