Both liberals and conservatives believe that using facts in political discussions helps to foster mutual respect, but 15 studies—across multiple methodologies and issues—show that these beliefs are mistaken. Political opponents respect moral beliefs more when they are supported by personal experiences, not facts. The respect-inducing power of personal experiences is revealed by survey studies across various political topics, a field study of conversations about guns, an analysis of YouTube comments from abortion opinion videos, and an archival analysis of 137 interview transcripts from Fox News and CNN. The personal experiences most likely to encourage respect from opponents are issue-relevant and involve harm. Mediation analyses reveal that these harm-related personal experiences increase respect by increasing perceptions of rationality: everyone can appreciate that avoiding harm is rational, even in people who hold different beliefs about guns, taxes, immigration, and the environment. Studies show that people believe in the truth of both facts and personal experiences in nonmoral disagreement; however, in moral disagreements, subjective experiences seem truer (i.e., are doubted less) than objective facts. These results provide a concrete demonstration of how to bridge moral divides while also revealing how our intuitions can lead us astray. Stretching back to the Enlightenment, philosophers andmore »
Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood:Comparing Intentions and Perceptions in Online Discussions
Discourse involves two perspectives: a person’s intention in making an utterance and others’ perception of that utterance. The misalignment between these perspectives can lead to undesirable outcomes, such as misunderstandings, low productivity and even overt strife. In this work, we present a computational framework for exploring and comparing both perspectives in online public discussions.
We combine logged data about public comments on Facebook with a survey of over 16,000 people about their intentions in writing these comments or about their perceptions of comments that others had written. Unlike previous studies of online discussions that have largely relied on third-party labels to quantify properties such as sentiment and subjectivity, our approach also directly captures what the speakers actually intended when writing their comments. In particular, our analysis focuses on judgments of whether a comment is stating a fact or an opinion, since these concepts were shown to be often confused.
We show that intentions and perceptions diverge in consequential ways. People are more likely to perceive opinions than to intend them, and linguistic cues that signal how an utterance is intended can differ from those that signal how it will be perceived. Further, this misalignment between intentions and perceptions can be linked to more »
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10176520
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of WWW
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 2066 to 2077
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Publisher's Version of Record
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3366423.3380273
