Winning Arguments

Abstract

Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges\nof social interaction. The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is\nhard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's\nviews shift. Fortunately, ChangeMyView, an active community on Reddit, provides\na platform where users present their own opinions and reasoning, invite others\nto contest them, and acknowledge when the ensuing discussions change their\noriginal views. In this work, we study these interactions to understand the\nmechanisms behind persuasion.\n We find that persuasive arguments are characterized by interesting patterns\nof interaction dynamics, such as participant entry-order and degree of\nback-and-forth exchange. Furthermore, by comparing similar counterarguments to\nthe same opinion, we show that language factors play an essential role. In\nparticular, the interplay between the language of the opinion holder and that\nof the counterargument provides highly predictive cues of persuasiveness.\nFinally, since even in this favorable setting people may not be persuaded, we\ninvestigate the problem of determining whether someone's opinion is susceptible\nto being changed at all. For this more difficult task, we show that stylistic\nchoices in how the opinion is expressed carry predictive power.\n