The process of news consumption has undergone great changes over the past decade: Information is now available in an ever-increasing amount from a plethora of sources. Recent work suggests that most people would favor algorithmic solutions over human editors. This stands in contrast to public and scholarly debate about the pitfalls of algorithmic news selection—i.e., the so-called “filter bubbles.” This study therefore investigates reasons and motivations which might lead people to prefer algorithmic gatekeepers over human ones. We expect that people have more algorithmic appreciation when consuming news to pass time, entertain oneself, or out of escapism than when using news to keep up-to-date with politics (H1). Secondly, we hypothesize the extent to which people are confident in their own cognitive abilities to moderate that relationship: When people are overconfident in their own capabilities to estimate the relevance of information, they are more likely to have higher levels of algorithmic appreciation, due to the third person effect (H2). For testing those two pre-registered hypotheses, we conducted an online survey with a sample of 268 US participants and replicated our study using a sample of 384 Dutch participants. The results show that the first hypothesis cannot be supported by our data. However, a positive interaction between overconfidence and algorithmic appreciation for the gratification of surveillance (i.e., gaining information about the world, society, and politics) was found in both samples. Thereby, our study contributes to our understanding of the underlying reasons people have for choosing different forms of gatekeeping when selecting news.

中文翻译：

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算法新闻选择中的认知过度自信

在过去十年中，新闻消费的过程发生了巨大变化：现在可以从大量来源获得的信息量不断增加。最近的工作表明，与人工编辑相比，大多数人更喜欢算法解决方案。这与关于算法新闻选择缺陷的公开和学术辩论形成鲜明对比，即所谓的“过滤气泡”。因此，本研究调查了可能导致人们更喜欢算法守门人而不是人类守门人的原因和动机。我们期望人们在消费新闻来打发时间、娱乐自己或逃避现实时，比使用新闻了解政治时有更多的算法鉴赏力（H1）。其次，我们假设人们对自己的认知能力有信心来调节这种关系：当人们对自己估计信息相关性的能力过度自信时，由于第三人称效应（H2），他们更有可能拥有更高水平的算法鉴赏力。为了测试这两个预先注册的假设，我们对 268 名美国参与者的样本进行了在线调查，并使用 384 名荷兰参与者的样本重复了我们的研究。结果表明，我们的数据不能支持第一个假设。然而，在两个样本中都发现了过度自信和对满足监视（即获取有关世界、社会和政治的信息）的算法欣赏之间的正向交互作用。因此，我们的研究有助于我们理解人们在选择新闻时选择不同形式的把关的根本原因。