Milgram's experiment in the knowledge space: Individual navigation strategies

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhu, Manran, Kertész, János
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhu, Manran
Kertész, János
author_facet Zhu, Manran
Kertész, János
contents Data deluge characteristic for our times has led to information overload, posing a significant challenge to effectively finding our way through the digital landscape. Addressing this issue requires an in-depth understanding of how we navigate through the abundance of information. Previous research has discovered multiple patterns in how individuals navigate in the geographic, social, and information spaces, yet individual differences in strategies for navigation in the knowledge space has remained largely unexplored. To bridge the gap, we conducted an online experiment where participants played a navigation game on Wikipedia and completed questionnaires about their personal information. Utilizing the hierarchical structure of the English Wikipedia and a graph embedding trained on it, we identified two navigation strategies and found that there are significant individual differences in the choices of them. Older, white and female participants tend to adopt a proximity-driven strategy, while younger participants prefer a hub-driven strategy. Our study connects social navigation to knowledge navigation: individuals' differing tendencies to use geographical and occupational information about the target person to navigate in the social space can be understood as different choices between the hub-driven and proximity-driven strategies in the knowledge space.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_06591
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Milgram's experiment in the knowledge space: Individual navigation strategies
Zhu, Manran
Kertész, János
Physics and Society
Information Retrieval
Data deluge characteristic for our times has led to information overload, posing a significant challenge to effectively finding our way through the digital landscape. Addressing this issue requires an in-depth understanding of how we navigate through the abundance of information. Previous research has discovered multiple patterns in how individuals navigate in the geographic, social, and information spaces, yet individual differences in strategies for navigation in the knowledge space has remained largely unexplored. To bridge the gap, we conducted an online experiment where participants played a navigation game on Wikipedia and completed questionnaires about their personal information. Utilizing the hierarchical structure of the English Wikipedia and a graph embedding trained on it, we identified two navigation strategies and found that there are significant individual differences in the choices of them. Older, white and female participants tend to adopt a proximity-driven strategy, while younger participants prefer a hub-driven strategy. Our study connects social navigation to knowledge navigation: individuals' differing tendencies to use geographical and occupational information about the target person to navigate in the social space can be understood as different choices between the hub-driven and proximity-driven strategies in the knowledge space.
title Milgram's experiment in the knowledge space: Individual navigation strategies
topic Physics and Society
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06591