The technological revolution of the Internet has digitized the social, economic, political, and cultural activities of billions of humans. While researchers have been paying due attention to concerns of misinformation and bias, these obscure a much less researched and equally insidious problem - that of uncritically consuming incomplete information. The problem of incomplete information consumption stems from the very nature of explicitly ranked information on digital platforms, where our limited mental capacities leave us with little choice but to consume the tip of a pre-ranked information iceberg. This study makes two chief contributions. First, we leverage the context of internet search to propose an innovative metric that quantifies information completeness. For a given search query, this refers to the extent of the information spectrum that is observed during web browsing. We then validate this metric using 6.5 trillion search results extracted from daily search trends across 48 nations for one year. Second, we find causal evidence that awareness of information completeness while browsing the Internet reduces resistance to factual information, hence paving the way towards an open-minded and tolerant mindset.

翻译：互联网技术革命已将数十亿人的社会、经济、政治及文化活动全面数字化。尽管研究者们已对错误信息和偏见问题给予充分关注，这些问题却掩盖了一个研究较少但同样具有潜在危害的难题——即对不完整信息的非批判性消费。不完整信息消费问题源于数字平台上显式排序信息的本质特性：我们有限的心智能力使我们别无选择，只能消费经过预排序的信息冰山之一角。本研究作出两项主要贡献：首先，我们借助互联网搜索情境提出了一种量化信息完整性的创新指标。针对特定搜索查询，该指标指代网络浏览过程中所观测到的信息光谱覆盖范围。随后，我们使用从48个国家全年每日搜索趋势中提取的6.5万亿条搜索结果对该指标进行了验证。其次，我们发现了因果性证据：在网络浏览过程中对信息完整性的认知会降低对事实信息的抗拒，从而为培养开放包容的思维模式铺平道路。