Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/3442381.3450122acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesthewebconfConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Conversations Gone Alright: Quantifying and Predicting Prosocial Outcomes in Online Conversations

Published: 03 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Online conversations can go in many directions: some turn out poorly due to antisocial behavior, while others turn out positively to the benefit of all. Research on improving online spaces has focused primarily on detecting and reducing antisocial behavior. Yet we know little about positive outcomes in online conversations and how to increase them—is a prosocial outcome simply the lack of antisocial behavior or something more? Here, we examine how conversational features lead to prosocial outcomes within online discussions. We introduce a series of new theory-inspired metrics to define prosocial outcomes such as mentoring and esteem enhancement. Using a corpus of 26M Reddit conversations, we show that these outcomes can be forecasted from the initial comment of an online conversation, with the best model providing a relative 24% improvement over human forecasting performance at ranking conversations for predicted outcome. Our results indicate that platforms can use these early cues in their algorithmic ranking of early conversations to prioritize better outcomes.

References

[1]
George A Akerlof and Rachel E Kranton. 2000. Economics and identity. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, 3 (2000), 715–753.
[2]
Sara B Algoe. 2012. Find, remind, and bind: The functions of gratitude in everyday relationships. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6, 6 (2012), 455–469.
[3]
Aymé Arango, Jorge Pérez, and Barbara Poblete. 2019. Hate speech detection is not as easy as you may think: A closer look at model validation. In Proceedings of SIGIR. 45–54.
[4]
Jo-Anne Bachorowski and Michael J Owren. 2001. Not all laughs are alike: Voiced but not unvoiced laughter readily elicits positive affect. Psychological Science 12, 3 (2001), 252–257.
[5]
JinYeong Bak, Chin-Yew Lin, and Alice Oh. 2014. Self-disclosure topic model for classifying and analyzing Twitter conversations. In Proceedings of EMNLP. 1986–1996.
[6]
Daniel Bar-Tal. 1976. Prosocial behavior: Theory and research.Hemisphere Publishing Corp.
[7]
Azy Barak and Orit Gluck-Ofri. 2007. Degree and reciprocity of self-disclosure in online forums. CyberPsychology & Behavior 10, 3 (2007), 407–417.
[8]
Monica Y Bartlett and David DeSteno. 2006. Gratitude and prosocial behavior: Helping when it costs you. Psychological science 17, 4 (2006), 319–325.
[9]
C Daniel Batson and Adam A Powell. 2003. Altruism and prosocial behavior. Handbook of psychology(2003), 463–484.
[10]
Roger Berry. 2009. You could say that: the generic second-person pronoun in modern English. English Today 25, 3 (2009), 29–34.
[11]
Prakhar Biyani, Cornelia Caragea, Prasenjit Mitra, and John Yen. 2014. Identifying emotional and informational support in online health communities. In Proceedings of COLING.
[12]
Jonathon D Brown and S Smart. 1991. The self and social conduct: Linking self-representations to prosocial behavior.Journal of Personality and Social psychology 60, 3(1991), 368.
[13]
Penelope Brown. 2015. Politeness and language. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences (IESBS),(2nd ed.). Elsevier, 326–330.
[14]
Taina Bucher. 2012. Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New media & society 14, 7 (2012), 1164–1180.
[15]
Sven Buechel, Anneke Buffone, Barry Slaff, Lyle Ungar, and Joao Sedoc. 2018. Modeling empathy and distress in reaction to news stories. In Proceedings of IJCNLP.
[16]
Anthony L Burrow and Nicolette Rainone. 2017. How many likes did I get?: Purpose moderates links between positive social media feedback and self-esteem.Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 69 (2017), 232–236.
[17]
Stevie Chancellor, Andrea Hu, and Munmun De Choudhury. 2018. Norms matter: contrasting social support around behavior change in online weight loss communities. In Proceedings of CHI. 1–14.
[18]
Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Mattia Samory, Shagun Jhaver, Hunter Charvat, Amy Bruckman, Cliff Lampe, Jacob Eisenstein, and Eric Gilbert. 2018. The Internet’s Hidden Rules: An Empirical Study of Reddit Norm Violations at Micro, Meso, and Macro Scales. Proceedings of CSCW (2018).
[19]
Jonathan P Chang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. 2019. Trouble on the horizon: Forecasting the derailment of online conversations as they develop. In Proceedings of EMNLP.
[20]
Tianqi Chen and Carlos Guestrin. 2016. Xgboost: A scalable tree boosting system. In Proceedings of KDD.
[21]
Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Anyone can become a troll: Causes of trolling behavior in online discussions. In Proceedings of CSCW. ACM, 1217–1230.
[22]
Minje Choi, Luca Maria Aiello, Krisztián Zsolt Varga, and Daniele Quercia. 2020. Ten social dimensions of conversations and relationships. In Proceedings of The Web Conference. 1514–1525.
[23]
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee, Bo Pang, and Jon Kleinberg. 2012. Echoes of power: Language effects and power differences in social interaction. In Proceedings of WWW. ACM, 699–708.
[24]
Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Moritz Sudhof, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts. 2013. A computational approach to politeness with application to social factors. In Proceedings of ACL.
[25]
Sebastian Deri, Jeremie Rappaz, Luca Maria Aiello, and Daniele Quercia. 2018. Coloring in the links: Capturing social ties as they are perceived. Proceedings of CSCW (2018).
[26]
Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2019. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of NAACL.
[27]
Steve Duck. 2007. Human relationships. Sage.
[28]
Maeve Duggan. 2017. Online harassment 2017. (2017).
[29]
Robert A Emmons and Michael E McCullough. 2004. The psychology of gratitude. Oxford University Press.
[30]
Facebook Research. 2019. Instagram Request for Proposals for Well-being and Safety Research. https://research.fb.com/programs/research-awards/proposals/instagram-request-for-proposals-for-well-being-and-safety-research/.
[31]
Paula Fortuna and Sérgio Nunes. 2018. A survey on automatic detection of hate speech in text. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 51, 4 (2018), 85.
[32]
Jeremy A Frimer, Karl Aquino, Jochen E Gebauer, Luke Lei Zhu, and Harrison Oakes. 2015. A decline in prosocial language helps explain public disapproval of the US Congress. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, 21(2015), 6591–6594.
[33]
Jeremy A Frimer, Nicola K Schaefer, and Harrison Oakes. 2014. Moral actor, selfish agent.Journal of personality and social psychology 106, 5(2014), 790.
[34]
Tarleton Gillespie. 2018. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
[35]
Lorenz Goette, David Huffman, and Stephan Meier. 2012. The impact of social ties on group interactions: Evidence from minimal groups and randomly assigned real groups. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 4, 1 (2012), 101–15.
[36]
David Greatbatch and Timothy Clark. 2003. Displaying group cohesiveness: Humour and laughter in the public lectures of management gurus. Human relations 56, 12 (2003), 1515–1544.
[37]
Tommi Gröndahl, Luca Pajola, Mika Juuti, Mauro Conti, and N Asokan. 2018. All You Need is” Love” Evading Hate Speech Detection. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security. 2–12.
[38]
Clayton J Hutto and Eric Gilbert. 2014. Vader: A parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text. In Proceedings of ICWSM.
[39]
Yunhao Jiao, Cheng Li, Fei Wu, and Qiaozhu Mei. 2018. Find the conversation killers: A predictive study of thread-ending posts. In Proceedings of the Web Conference.
[40]
Adam N Joinson. 2001. Self-disclosure in computer-mediated communication: The role of self-awareness and visual anonymity. European journal of social psychology 31, 2 (2001), 177–192.
[41]
Adam N Joinson and Carina B Paine. 2007. Self-disclosure, privacy and the Internet. The Oxford handbook of Internet psychology 2374252 (2007).
[42]
Sidney M Joward. 1971. Self-dislosure: An Experimental Analysis of the Transparent Self. Wiley Interscience.
[43]
David Jurgens, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, and Libby Hemphill. 2019. A Just and Comprehensive Strategy for Using NLP to Address Online Abuse. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
[44]
Roberta L Knickerbocker. 2003. Prosocial behavior. Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University (2003), 1–3.
[45]
Varada Kolhatkar and Maite Taboada. 2017. Constructive language in news comments. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Abusive Language Online.
[46]
Varada Kolhatkar, Nithum Thain, Jeffrey Sorensen, Lucas Dixon, and Maite Taboada. 2020. Classifying Constructive Comments. First Monday. (2020).
[47]
Wojciech Kulesza, Dariusz Dolinski, Avia Huisman, and Robert Majewski. 2014. The echo effect: The power of verbal mimicry to influence prosocial behavior. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 33, 2 (2014), 183–201.
[48]
Srijan Kumar, Justin Cheng, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Antisocial behavior on the web: Characterization and detection. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion. 947–950.
[49]
Srijan Kumar, Xikun Zhang, and Jure Leskovec. 2019. Predicting dynamic embedding trajectory in temporal interaction networks. In Proceedings of KD. ACM, 1269–1278.
[50]
Zhenzhong Lan, Mingda Chen, Sebastian Goodman, Kevin Gimpel, Piyush Sharma, and Radu Soricut. 2019. Albert: A lite bert for self-supervised learning of language representations. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.11942(2019).
[51]
David Lazer. 2015. The rise of the social algorithm. Science 348, 6239 (2015), 1090–1091.
[52]
Ping Liu, Joshua Guberman, Libby Hemphill, and Aron Culotta. 2018. Forecasting the presence and intensity of hostility on Instagram using linguistic and social features. In Proceedings of ICWSM.
[53]
J Nathan Matias. 2019. Preventing harassment and increasing group participation through social norms in 2,190 online science discussions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, 20(2019), 9785–9789.
[54]
Andrew Kachites McCallum. 2002. MALLET: A Machine Learning for Language Toolkit. (2002). http://mallet.cs.umass.edu.
[55]
Michael E McCullough, Shelley D Kilpatrick, Robert A Emmons, and David B Larson. 2001. Is gratitude a moral affect?Psychological bulletin 127, 2 (2001), 249.
[56]
Michael E McCullough, Marcia B Kimeldorf, and Adam D Cohen. 2008. An adaptation for altruism: The social causes, social effects, and social evolution of gratitude. Current directions in psychological science 17, 4 (2008), 281–285.
[57]
David N Milne, Glen Pink, Ben Hachey, and Rafael A Calvo. 2016. Clpsych 2016 shared task: Triaging content in online peer-support forums. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology. 118–127.
[58]
Paul Mussen and Nancy Eisenberg-Berg. 1977. Roots of caring, sharing, and helping: The development of pro-social behavior in children.WH Freeman.
[59]
Courtney Napoles, Aasish Pappu, and Joel Tetreault. 2017. Automatically identifying good conversations online (yes, they do exist!). In Proceedings of ICWSM.
[60]
Courtney Napoles, Joel Tetreault, Aasish Pappu, Enrica Rosato, and Brian Provenzale. 2017. Finding good conversations online: The Yahoo News annotated comments corpus. In Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop.
[61]
Amit Navindgi, Caroline Brun, Cécile Boulard Masson, and Scott Nowson. 2016. Steps toward automatic understanding of the function of affective language in support groups. In Proceedings of The Fourth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media. 26–33.
[62]
Kate G Niederhoffer and James W Pennebaker. 2002. Linguistic style matching in social interaction. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21, 4 (2002), 337–360.
[63]
Ariana Orvell, Ethan Kross, and Susan A Gelman. 2017. How “you” makes meaning. Science 355, 6331 (2017), 1299–1302.
[64]
Michael J Owren and Jo-Anne Bachorowski. 2003. Reconsidering the evolution of nonlinguistic communication: The case of laughter. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 27, 3 (2003), 183–200.
[65]
Mitchell J Prinstein and Antonius HN Cillessen. 2003. Forms and functions of adolescent peer aggression associated with high levels of peer status. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly (1982-)(2003), 310–342.
[66]
Sarah T Roberts. 2014. Behind the screen: The hidden digital labor of commercial content moderation. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
[67]
Koustuv Saha, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, and Munmun De Choudhury. 2019. Prevalence and Psychological Effects of Hateful Speech in Online College Communities. In Proceedings of Web Science.
[68]
Maarten Sap, Dallas Card, Saadia Gabriel, Yejin Choi, and Noah A Smith. 2019. The risk of racial bias in hate speech detection. In Proceedings of ACL.
[69]
Lauren E Scissors, Alastair J Gill, and Darren Gergle. 2008. Linguistic mimicry and trust in text-based CMC. In Proceedings of CSCW.
[70]
Ashish Sharma, Adam S Miner, David C Atkins, and Tim Althoff. 2020. A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support. In Proceedings of EMNLP.
[71]
Lee Sproull. 2011. Prosocial behavior on the net. Daedalus 140, 4 (2011), 140–153.
[72]
Paul J Taylor and Sally Thomas. 2008. Linguistic style matching and negotiation outcome. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research 1, 3 (2008), 263–281.
[73]
Jean M Twenge, Roy F Baumeister, C Nathan DeWall, Natalie J Ciarocco, and J Michael Bartels. 2007. Social exclusion decreases prosocial behavior.Journal of personality and social psychology 92, 1(2007), 56.
[74]
Twitter. 2018. Twitter health metrics proposal submission. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/twitter-health-metrics-proposal-submission.html.
[75]
Bertie Vidgen, Alex Harris, Dong Nguyen, Rebekah Tromble, Scott Hale, and Helen Margetts. 2019. Challenges and frontiers in abusive content detection. In ACL.
[76]
Rob Voigt, Nicholas P Camp, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, William L Hamilton, Rebecca C Hetey, Camilla M Griffiths, David Jurgens, Dan Jurafsky, and Jennifer L Eberhardt. 2017. Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, 25(2017), 6521–6526.
[77]
Yafei Wang, John Yen, and David Reitter. 2015. Pragmatic alignment on social support type in health forum conversations. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics. 9–18.
[78]
Zijian Wang and David Jurgens. 2018. It’s going to be okay: Measuring Access to Support in Online Communities. In Proceedings of EMNLP.
[79]
Zeerak Waseem, Thomas Davidson, Dana Warmsley, and Ingmar Weber. 2017. Understanding abuse: A typology of abusive language detection subtasks. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language.
[80]
Thomas Ashby Wills. 1991. Social support and interpersonal relationships.(1991).
[81]
Thomas Wolf, Lysandre Debut, Victor Sanh, Julien Chaumond, Clement Delangue, Anthony Moi, Pierric Cistac, Tim Rault, Rémi Louf, Morgan Funtowicz, Joe Davison, Sam Shleifer, Patrick von Platen, Clara Ma, Yacine Jernite, Julien Plu, Canwen Xu, Teven Le Scao, Sylvain Gugger, Mariama Drame, Quentin Lhoest, and Alexander M. Rush. 2020. Transformers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of EMNLP.
[82]
Michelle F Wright and Yan Li. 2011. The associations between young adults’ face-to-face prosocial behaviors and their online prosocial behaviors. Computers in Human Behavior 27, 5 (2011), 1959–1962.
[83]
Michelle F Wright and Yan Li. 2012. Prosocial behaviors in the cyber context. In Encyclopedia of cyber behavior. IGI Global, 328–341.
[84]
Ellery Wulczyn, Nithum Thain, and Lucas Dixon. [n.d.]. Ex machina: Personal attacks seen at scale. In Proceedings of the Web Conference.
[85]
Justine Zhang, Jonathan P Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lucas Dixon, Yiqing Hua, Nithum Thain, and Dario Taraborelli. 2018. Conversations gone awry: Detecting early signs of conversational failure. In Proceedings of ACL.
[86]
Naitian Zhou and David Jurgens. 2020. Condolences and Empathy in Online Communities. In Proceedings of EMNLP.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)In Pursuit of Constructive Communication: Designing Tools to Support Development of Constructive Communication MetricsCompanion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3656156.3663720(121-124)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Computational Politeness in Natural Language Processing: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/365466056:9(1-42)Online publication date: 8-May-2024
  • (2024)Community Archetypes: An Empirical Framework for Guiding Research Methodologies to Reflect User Experiences of Sense of Virtual Community on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373108:CSCW1(1-33)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '21: Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021
April 2021
4054 pages
ISBN:9781450383127
DOI:10.1145/3442381
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]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 June 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. antisocial behavior
  2. behavioral forecasting
  3. prosocial behavior
  4. social media

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

WWW '21
Sponsor:
WWW '21: The Web Conference 2021
April 19 - 23, 2021
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)230
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)32
Reflects downloads up to 01 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)In Pursuit of Constructive Communication: Designing Tools to Support Development of Constructive Communication MetricsCompanion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3656156.3663720(121-124)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Computational Politeness in Natural Language Processing: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/365466056:9(1-42)Online publication date: 8-May-2024
  • (2024)Community Archetypes: An Empirical Framework for Guiding Research Methodologies to Reflect User Experiences of Sense of Virtual Community on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373108:CSCW1(1-33)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • (2024)“People are Way too Obsessed with Rank”: Trust System in Social Virtual RealityComputer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)10.1007/s10606-024-09498-7Online publication date: 4-May-2024
  • (2023)Immigrant-critical alternative media in online conversationsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.029463618:11(e0294636)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
  • (2023)International Student Profiling FrameworkIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.332341611(114117-114127)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)A multi-task learning framework for politeness and emotion detection in dialogues for mental health counselling and legal aidExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120025224:COnline publication date: 15-Aug-2023
  • (2022)Thread With Caution: Proactively Helping Users Assess and Deescalate Tension in Their Online DiscussionsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35556036:CSCW2(1-37)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)The Impact of Governance Bots on Sense of Virtual CommunityProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555636:CSCW2(1-30)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2021)Effective Strategies for Crowd-Powered Cognitive Reappraisal Systems: A Field Deployment of the Flip*Doubt Web Application for Mental HealthProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34795615:CSCW2(1-37)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021

View Options

Get Access

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media