research-article

Changing Others' Beliefs Online: Online Comments' Persuasiveness

Authors:

Taraneh KhazaeiAuthors Info & Claims

SMSociety '19: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society

Pages 92 - 101

https://doi.org/10.1145/3328529.3328549

Published: 19 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Achieving social welfare and success is heavily reliant on our ability to persuade and influence others, yet this capacity is known to be one of the most challenging social skills to develop and possess. With social networking websites becoming a crucial platform for routine social activities, gaining insight into the strategies and mechanisms behind online persuasion is of great interest and value to a variety of disciplines. Hence, in this study, we aim to study written comments in online deliberations and understand what makes people change their beliefs. We explore different dimensions of the language, the order of the comments, as well as the attributes of the participating users and their relation to the persuasion process. In addition, we investigate the factors that persuaded users (the ones who have already changed their beliefs) perceived to be the reasons that led to their opinion change. We link our findings to earlier research on persuasion and belief change in traditional forms, hoping to uncover when and how they apply to online persuasion.

References

[1]

ALLEN, M. 1991. Meta-analysis comparing the persuasiveness of one-sided and two-sided messages. Western J. of Speech Communication, 55 (4), 390--404.

[2]

ALTHOFF, T., DANESCU-NICULESCU-MIZIL, C., AND JURAFSKY, D. 2014. How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests. In Proc. of the 8th Int. Conf. on Web and Social Media, (Ann Arbor, Michigan), AAAI Press.

[3]

BIRAN, O., ROSENTHAL, S., ANDREAS, J., MCKEOWN, K., AND RAM-BOW, O. 2012. Detecting influencers in written online conversations. In Proc. of 2nd Workshop on Language in Social Media, (Jeju Island, Republic of Korea), ACL, 37--45.

Digital Library

[4]

BRADAC, J.J., DESMOND, R.J., AND MURDOCK, J. I. 1977. Diversity and density: Lexically determined evaluative and informational consequences of linguistic complexity. Communications Monographs, 44 (4), 273--283.

[5]

CIALDINI, R. 2007. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Collins, NY.

[6]

CRISMORE, A., MARKKANEN, R., AND STEFFENSEN, M.S. 1993. Metadiscourse in persuasive writing: A study of texts written by American and Finnish university students. Written communication, 10 (1), 39--71.

[7]

CROSSLEY, S.A., AND MCNAMARA, D.S. 2012. Predicting second language writing proficiency: The roles of cohesion and linguistic sophistication. J. of Research in Reading, 35 (2), 115--135.

[8]

DILLARD, J.P., SHEN, L., AND VAIL, R.G. 2007. Does perceived message effectiveness cause persuasion or vice versa? 17 consistent answers. Human Communication Research, 33 (4), 467--488.

[9]

DOLE, J.A., AND SINATRA, G.M. 1998. Reconceptualizing change in the cognitive construction of knowledge. Educational psychologist, 33 (2-3), 109--128.

[10]

GRAESSER, A.C., MCNAMARA, D.S., LOUWERSE, M.M., AND CAI, Z. 2004. Coh-Metrix: Analysis of text on cohesion and language. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36 (2), 193--202.

[11]

HABERNAL, I., WACHSMUTH, H., GUREVYCH, I., & STEIN, B. 2018. Before Name-calling: Dynamics and Triggers of Ad Hominem Fallacies in Web Argumentation. In Proc. of Conf. of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, (New Orleans, USA), ACL, arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.06613.

[12]

HIDEY, C., MUSI, E., HWANG, A., MURESAN, S., AND MCKEOWN, K. 2017. Analyzing the semantic types of claims and premises in an online persuasive forum. In Proc. of the 4th Workshop on Argument Mining, (Copenhagen, Denmark), ACL, 11--21.

[13]

HIDEY, C., AND MCKEOWN, K. 2018. Persuasive Influence Detection: The Role of Argument Sequencing. In Proc. of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (New Orleans, Louisiana), AAAI Press.

[14]

HOSMAN, L.A. 2002. Language and persuasion. The persuasion handbook: Developments in theory and practice, Sage Publications, 371--390.

[15]

HSIEH, H.P., YAN, R., AND LI, C.T. 2016. Will I Win Your Favor? Predicting the Success of Altruistic Requests. In Pacific-Asia Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, (Auckland, New Zealand), Springer, 177--188.

[16]

HULLETT, C.R. 2005. The impact of mood on persuasion: A meta-analysis. Communication Research, 32 (4), 423--442.

[17]

JO, Y., PODDAR, S., JEON, B., SHEN, Q., ROSÉ, C.P., AND NEUBIG, G. 2018. Attentive Interaction Model: Modeling Changes in View in Argumentation. In Proc. of Conf. of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, (New Orleans, USA), ACL, arXiv:1804.00065.

[18]

KHAZAEI, T., XIAO, L., AND MERCER, R. 2017. Writing to Persuade: Analysis and Detection of Persuasive Discourse, In Proc. of iConference, (Wuhan, China), http://hdl.handle.net/2142/96673

[19]

KLEIN, D., AND MANNING, C.D. 2003. Accurate unlexicalized parsing. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics-Volume 1, ACL, 423--430.

Digital Library

[20]

LONGO, B. 1994. The Role of Metadiscourse in Persuasion. Technical Communication 41 (2), 348--352.

[21]

LUQUE, L.B. 2011. Giving Reasons: A Linguistic-Pragmatic Approach to Argumentation Theory Springer Netherlands. Springer Science & Business Media.

[22]

MALIK, M., AND PFEFFER, J. 2016. Identifying platform effects in social media data. In &die;Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, (Cologne, Germany), AAA Press, 241--249.

[23]

MCCLURE, G.M. 1987. Readability formulas: Useful or useless? IEEE Trans. on Professional Communication PC, 30 (1), 12--15.

[24]

MENSAH, H., XIAO, L., & SOUNDARAJAN, S. 2019. Characterizing Susceptible Users on Reddit's ChangeMyView, In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society, (Toronto, Canada), ACM.

Digital Library

[25]

MILLER, GERALD.R., AND MICHAEL E. Roloff. 2002. Persuasion: New directions in theory and research, Sage Publications.

[26]

MITRA, T., AND GILBERT, E. 2014. The language that gets people to give: Phrases that predict success on Kickstarter. In Proc. of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, (Baltimore, Maryland), ACM, 49--61.

Digital Library

[27]

MURPHY, P.K. 2001. What makes a text persuasive? Comparing students and experts conceptions of persuasiveness. Int. J. of Educational Research, 35 (7-8), 675--698.

[28]

NYHAN, B., AND REIFLER, J. 2010. When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303--330.

[29]

PENNEBAKER, J.W. 2011. The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us. Bloomsbury, USA.

[30]

PENNEBAKER, J.W., BOYD, R.L., JORDAN, K., AND BLACKBURN, K. 2015. The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2015.

[31]

PETTY, R. E., & CACIOPPO, J. T. 1986. The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. Advances in experimental social psychology, 19, 123--205.

[32]

PETTY, R.E., AND WEGENER, D.T. 1998. Matching Versus Mis-matching Attitude Functions: Implications for Scrutiny of Persuasive Messages. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin., 24(3), 227--240.

[33]

QUERCIA, D., ELLIS, J., CAPRA, L., AND CROWCROFT, J. 2011. In the mood for being influential on twitter. In 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on Social Computing, IEEE, 307--314.

[34]

RIQUELME, F., AND GONZALEZ-CANTERGIANI, P. 2016. Measuring user influence on Twitter: A survey. Information Processing & Management, 52 (5), 949--975.

Digital Library

[35]

SALTIEL, J., AND WOELFEL, J. 1975. Inertia in cognitive processes: The role of accumulated information in attitude change. Human Communication Research 1 (4), 333--344.

[36]

SIMONS, H. W. 1976. Persuasion: Understanding, practice, and analysis, Addison Wesley Publishing Company.

[37]

SOOD, S. O., AND CHURCHILL, E. F. 2010. Anger management: Using sentiment analysis to manage online communities. Grace Hopper Celebration, (Atlanta, Georgia)

[38]

SPARKS, J. R., ARENI, C. S., AND COX, K. C. 1998. An investigation of the effects of language style and communication modality on persuasion. Communications Monographs, 65 (2), 108--125.

[39]

TAN, C., NICULAE, V., DANESCU-NICULESCU-MIZIL, C., AND LEE, L. 2016. Winning arguments: Interaction dynamics and persuasion strategies in good-faith online discussions. In Proc. of the 25th Int. Conf. on World Wide Web, International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 613--624.

Digital Library

[40]

TAUSCZIK, Y. R. AND PENNEBAKER, J. W. 2010. The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods. J. of Language and Social Psychology, 29 (1), 24--54.

[41]

XIAO, L. 2018. A Message's Persuasive Features in Wikipedia's Article for Deletion Discussions. In Proc. of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, (Copenhagen, Denmark), ACM, 345--349.

Digital Library

[42]

YALCH, R. F., AND ELMORE-YALCH. R. 1984. The Effect of Numbers on the Route to Persuasion. J. of Consumer Research, 11 (1), 522--527.

Cited By

Daubs M(2024)Wellness communities and vaccine hesitancyMedia International Australia10.1177/1329878X241270526193:1(19-32)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X241270526
McKay DMakri SBuchanan G(2024)[citation needed]: An Examination of Types and Purpose of Evidence Provided in Three Online Discussions on RedditProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638321(219-230)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638321
Joyce EOzturk PPike J(2022)Effective Organizing on the Fly: Social Capital in Temporary OrganizationsJournal of Computer Information Systems10.1080/08874417.2022.214345663:5(1213-1227)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/08874417.2022.2143456
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Changing Others' Beliefs Online: Online Comments' Persuasiveness
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
    1. Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing

Recommendations

A Message's Persuasive Features in Wikipedia's Article for Deletion Discussions
SMSociety '18: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society

In this study, we examine indicators of an OOC comment's persuasive power in the context of Wikipedia's Article for Deletion (AfD) discussions. Our preliminary results are in general consistent with the previous persuasion studies in Reddit discussion. ...
How can you persuade me online? The impact of goal-driven motivations on attention to online information
Abstract
Individuals are increasingly using the internet to communicate online with many of their interactions being persuasive. Whilst there is some evidence to suggest that persuasion can occur online it is still unclear as to the underlying ...
Highlights
- Online persuasive information processing is motivated by goal-driven behaviour.
How Founder Motivations, Goals, and Actions Influence Early Trajectories of Online Communities
CHI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Online communities offer their members various benefits, such as information access, social and emotional support, and entertainment. Despite the important role that founders play in shaping communities, prior research has focused primarily on what ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

SMSociety '19: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society

July 2019

247 pages

ISBN:9781450366519

DOI:10.1145/3328529

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

Ryerson Univeristy: Ryerson Univeristy

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 July 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Conference

SMSociety '19

SMSociety '19: International Conference on Social Media and Society

July 19 - 21, 2019

ON, Toronto, Canada

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 78 of 189 submissions, 41%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

13
Total Citations
View Citations
479
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)79
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)12

Reflects downloads up to 20 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Daubs M(2024)Wellness communities and vaccine hesitancyMedia International Australia10.1177/1329878X241270526193:1(19-32)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X241270526
McKay DMakri SBuchanan G(2024)[citation needed]: An Examination of Types and Purpose of Evidence Provided in Three Online Discussions on RedditProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638321(219-230)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638321
Joyce EOzturk PPike J(2022)Effective Organizing on the Fly: Social Capital in Temporary OrganizationsJournal of Computer Information Systems10.1080/08874417.2022.214345663:5(1213-1227)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/08874417.2022.2143456
Miyazaki KUchiba TTanaka KSasahara K(2022)Aggressive behaviour of anti-vaxxers and their toxic replies in English and JapaneseHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-022-01245-x9:1Online publication date: 5-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01245-x
Xiao LMensah H(2022)How Does the Thread Level of a Comment Affect its Perceived Persuasiveness? A Reddit StudyIntelligent Computing10.1007/978-3-031-10464-0_55(800-813)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10464-0_55
Xiao LWu QSoundarajan SLi J(2022)Language Use and Susceptibility in Online ConversationIntelligent Computing10.1007/978-3-031-10464-0_54(787-799)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10464-0_54
Xiao LWang YWei X(2022)Persuasion in Audio‐based Social Media: A Clubhouse Interview StudyProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.74459:1(840-842)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.744
Miyazaki KUchiba TTanaka KSasahara K(2021)Characterizing the Anti-Vaxxers’ Reply Behavior on Social MediaIEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology10.1145/3498851.3498934(83-89)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498851.3498934
Spitzberg B(2021)Theorizing Social Media: A Formalization of the Multilevel Model of Meme Diffusion 2.0 (M3D2.0)Empowering Human Dynamics Research with Social Media and Geospatial Data Analytics10.1007/978-3-030-83010-6_2(13-30)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83010-6_2
Flynn OMurugadass AXiao L(2021)Attracting Attention in Online Health Forums: Studies of r/Alzheimers and r/dementiaDiversity, Divergence, Dialogue10.1007/978-3-030-71292-1_29(377-395)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71292-1_29
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents