Open-Mindedness and Style Coordination in Argumentative Discussions
This work addresses how psychological traits like open-mindedness influence communication dynamics in online debates, offering a novel perspective compared to prior focus on social status.
The study investigated the relationship between linguistic accommodation and open-mindedness in online argumentative discussions, finding that discussions reaching agreement show lower levels of accommodation.
Linguistic accommodation is the process in which speakers adjust their accent, diction, vocabulary, and other aspects of language according to the communication style of one another. Previous research has shown how linguistic accommodation correlates with gaps in the power and status of the speakers and the way it promotes approval and discussion efficiency. In this work, we provide a novel perspective on the phenomena, exploring its correlation with the open-mindedness of a speaker, rather than to her social status. We process thousands of unstructured argumentative discussions that took place in Reddit's Change My View (CMV) subreddit, demonstrating that open-mindedness relates to the assumed role of a speaker in different contexts. On the discussion level, we surprisingly find that discussions that reach agreement present lower levels of accommodation.