To explain or not to explain: the effects of personal characteristics when explaining music recommendations

Recommender systems have been increasingly used in online services that we consume daily, such as Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify. However, these systems are often presented to users as a "black box", i.e. the rationale for providing individual recommendations remains unexplained to users. In recent years, various attempts have been made to address this black box issue by providing textual explanations or interactive visualisations that enable users to explore the provenance of recommendations. Among other things, results demonstrated benefits in terms of precision and user satisfaction. Previous research had also indicated that personal characteristics such as domain knowledge, trust propensity and persistence may also play an important role on such perceived benefits. Yet, to date, little is known about the effects of personal characteristics on explaining recommendations. To address this gap, we developed a music recommender system with explanations and conducted an online study using a within-subject design. We captured various personal characteristics of participants and administered both qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods. Results indicate that personal characteristics have significant influence on the interaction and perception of recommender systems, and that this influence changes by adding explanations. For people with a low need for cognition are the explained recommendations the most beneficial. For people with a high need for cognition, we observed that explanations could create a lack of confidence. Based on these results, we present some design implications for explaining recommendations.