Cogito ergo quid? The Effect of Cognitive Style in a Transparent Mobile Music Recommender System

An increasing body of research indicates that transparency in recommender systems affects trust of users. Additionally, a vast amount of studies already showed that personality impacts the way users perceive a recommender system. However, only recently, research has begun to investigate the effects of cognitive style on the perception of recommender systems. Furthermore, it is still unclear whether this cognitive style also affects the interaction strategies of users, and whether the reason why and when users want transparency is affected by this cognitive style. Additionally, despite the ubiquitous presence of recommender systems on mobile environments, no study has investigated the effect of transparency for mobile music recommender systems. In this paper, we report the results of a within-subject study (N=25) on a mobile music recommender system where we investigated the effect of cognitive styles on three different aspects: the interaction strategies with the different applications, the reasons why and when users want transparency and the effect of transparency on the trust of users. The results show that users with a rational thinking style put more effort in seeking the best recommendations and that they want scrutable explanations to adjust the recommendation. In contrast, intuitive thinkers only need explanations when they search for a very specific kind of music.