Tell Me the Good Stuff: User Preferences in Movie Recommendation Explanations

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ahmad, Juan, Hellgren, Jonas, Said, Alan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ahmad, Juan
Hellgren, Jonas
Said, Alan
author_facet Ahmad, Juan
Hellgren, Jonas
Said, Alan
contents Recommender systems play a vital role in helping users discover content in streaming services, but their effectiveness depends on users understanding why items are recommended. In this study, explanations were based solely on item features rather than personalized data, simulating recommendation scenarios. We compared user perceptions of one-sided (purely positive) and two-sided (positive and negative) feature-based explanations for popular movie recommendations. Through an online study with 129 participants, we examined how explanation style affected perceived trust, transparency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. One-sided explanations consistently received higher ratings across all dimensions. Our findings suggest that in low-stakes entertainment domains such as popular movie recommendations, simpler positive explanations may be more effective. However, the results should be interpreted with caution due to potential confounding factors such as item familiarity and the placement of negative information in explanations. This work provides practical insights for explanation design in recommender interfaces and highlights the importance of context in shaping user preferences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03376
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tell Me the Good Stuff: User Preferences in Movie Recommendation Explanations
Ahmad, Juan
Hellgren, Jonas
Said, Alan
Information Retrieval
Human-Computer Interaction
Recommender systems play a vital role in helping users discover content in streaming services, but their effectiveness depends on users understanding why items are recommended. In this study, explanations were based solely on item features rather than personalized data, simulating recommendation scenarios. We compared user perceptions of one-sided (purely positive) and two-sided (positive and negative) feature-based explanations for popular movie recommendations. Through an online study with 129 participants, we examined how explanation style affected perceived trust, transparency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. One-sided explanations consistently received higher ratings across all dimensions. Our findings suggest that in low-stakes entertainment domains such as popular movie recommendations, simpler positive explanations may be more effective. However, the results should be interpreted with caution due to potential confounding factors such as item familiarity and the placement of negative information in explanations. This work provides practical insights for explanation design in recommender interfaces and highlights the importance of context in shaping user preferences.
title Tell Me the Good Stuff: User Preferences in Movie Recommendation Explanations
topic Information Retrieval
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03376