Does Social Pressure Drive Persuasion in Online Fora?

Ayush Jain, Shashank Srivastava


Abstract
Online forums such as ChangeMyView have been explored to research aspects of persuasion and argumentative quality in language. While previous research has focused on arguments between a view-holder and a persuader, we explore the premise that apart from the merits of arguments, persuasion is influenced by the ambient social community. We hypothesize that comments from the rest of the community can either affirm the original view or implicitly exert pressure to change it. We develop a structured model to capture the ambient community’s sentiment towards the discussion and its effect on persuasion. Our experiments show that social features themselves are significantly predictive of persuasion (even without looking at the actual content of discussion), with performance comparable to some earlier approaches that use content features. Combining community and content features leads to overall performance of 78.5% on the persuasion prediction task. Our analyses suggest that the effect of social pressure is comparable to the difference between persuasive and non-persuasive language strategies in driving persuasion and that social pressure might be a causal factor for persuasion.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.725
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9201–9208
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.725
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.725
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ayush Jain and Shashank Srivastava. 2021. Does Social Pressure Drive Persuasion in Online Fora?. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9201–9208, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Does Social Pressure Drive Persuasion in Online Fora? (Jain & Srivastava, EMNLP 2021)
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