Status Biases in Deliberation Online: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on ChangeMyView
Emaad Manzoor, Yohan Jo, Alan Montgomery
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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{manzoor-etal-2022-status,
title = "Status Biases in Deliberation Online: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on {C}hange{M}y{V}iew",
author = "Manzoor, Emaad and
Jo, Yohan and
Montgomery, Alan",
editor = "Goldberg, Yoav and
Kozareva, Zornitsa and
Zhang, Yue",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022",
month = dec,
year = "2022",
address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.474/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.474",
pages = "6351--6363"
}