@inproceedings{nabhani-etal-2025-storytelling,
    title = "Storytelling in Argumentative Discussions: Exploring the Use of Narratives in {C}hange{M}y{V}iew",
    author = "Nabhani, Sara  and
      Khatib, Khalid Al  and
      Pianzola, Federico  and
      Nissim, Malvina",
    editor = "Chistova, Elena  and
      Cimiano, Philipp  and
      Haddadan, Shohreh  and
      Lapesa, Gabriella  and
      Ruiz-Dolz, Ramon",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 12th Argument mining Workshop",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.argmining-1.21/",
    pages = "217--227",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-258-9",
    abstract = "Psychological research has long suggested that storytelling can shape beliefs and behaviors by fostering emotional engagement and narrative transportation. However, it remains unclear whether these effects extend to online argumentative discourse. In this paper, we examine the role of narrative in real-world argumentation using discussions from the ChangeMyView subreddit. Leveraging an automatic story detection model, we analyze how narrative use varies across persuasive comments, user types, discussion outcomes, and the kinds of change being sought. While narrative appears more frequently in some contexts, it is not consistently linked to successful persuasion. Notably, highly persuasive users tend to use narrative less, and storytelling does not demonstrate increased effectiveness for any specific type of persuasive goals. These findings suggest that narrative may play a limited and context-dependent role in online discussions, highlighting the need for computational models of argumentation to account for rhetorical diversity."
}