Detecting and Enhancing Intellectual Humility in Online Political Discourse
career value
223K/year
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the lack of systematic definitions, measurement tools, and interventions for intellectual humility (IH) in online political discourse—a gap that exacerbates group polarization and impedes cross-ideological understanding. The authors develop a multidimensional coding scheme encompassing both IH and its antithesis, intellectual arrogance, and apply it to manually annotate political posts from Reddit. Leveraging this annotated corpus, they train and validate a scalable machine learning classifier capable of quantifying IH at scale. Combining observational analyses with randomized controlled trials, the research reveals self-reinforcing dynamics in high- and low-IH discussion environments and provides the first evidence that lightweight interventions can significantly enhance users’ expressions of IH across diverse contentious topics without diminishing engagement.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Intellectual humility (IH)-a recognition of one's own intellectual limitations-can reduce polarization and foster more understanding across lines of difference. Yet little work explores how IH can be systematically defined, measured, evaluated, and enhanced in spaces that often lack it the most: online political discussions. In this paper, we seek to bridge these gaps by exploring two questions: 1) how might preexisting levels of IH influence future expressions of IH during online political discourse? and 2) can online interventions enhance IH across different political topics and conversational environments? To pursue these questions, we define a codebook characterizing different dimensions of IH and intellectual arrogance (IA) and have researchers use it to annotate several hundred Reddit posts, which we then use to develop and validate a classifier to support IH analysis at scale. These tools subsequently enable two key contributions: i) an observational data analysis of how IH varies across different political discussions on Reddit, which reveals that more/less IH environments tend to contain future posts of a similar nature, and ii) a randomized control trial evaluating strategies for nudging discussion participants to demonstrate more IH in their posts, which reveals the possibility of enhancing IH in online discussions across a range of contentious topics. Our findings highlight the possibility of measuring and increasing IH online without necessarily reducing engagement.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Intellectual Humility
Online Political Discourse
Measurement
Intervention
Polarization
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
intellectual humility
computational social science
online political discourse
machine learning classifier
behavioral intervention
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