Abstract
Status is widely used to incentivize user engagement online. However, visible status indicators could inadvertently bias online deliberation to favor high-status users. In this work, we design and deploy a randomized experiment on the ChangeMyView platform to quantify status biases in deliberation online. We find strong evidence of status bias: hiding status on ChangeMyView increases the persuasion rate of moderate-status users by 84% and decreases the persuasion rate of high-status users by 41% relative to the control group. We also find that the persuasive power of status is moderated by verbosity, suggesting that status is used as an information-processing heuristic under cognitive load. Finally, we find that a user’s status influences the argumentation behavior of other users they interact with in a manner that disadvantages low and moderate-status users.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.findings-emnlp.474
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 6351–6363
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.474
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.474
- Cite (ACL):
- Emaad Manzoor, Yohan Jo, and Alan Montgomery. 2022. Status Biases in Deliberation Online: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on ChangeMyView. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 6351–6363, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Status Biases in Deliberation Online: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on ChangeMyView (Manzoor et al., Findings 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/2022.findings-emnlp.474.pdf