The Diversity of Argument-Making in the Wild: from Assumptions and Definitions to Causation and Anecdote in Reddit's "Change My View"
This work provides empirical insights into real-world argument diversity and efficacy, addressing a gap in understanding how people argue in practice, though it is incremental in applying existing NLP tools to new data.
The study analyzed argument patterns on Reddit's 'Change My View' using NLP, identifying six distinct types, including personal experience and causation, and found that personal experience arguments are most effective at changing views, with a two-axis model explaining 80% of user strategy variance.
What kinds of arguments do people make, and what effect do they have on others? Normative constraints on argument-making are as old as philosophy itself, but little is known about the diversity of arguments made in practice. We use NLP tools to extract patterns of argument-making from the Reddit site "Change My View" (r/CMV). This reveals six distinct argument patterns: not just the familiar deductive and inductive forms, but also arguments about definitions, relevance, possibility and cause, and personal experience. Data from r/CMV also reveal differences in efficacy: personal experience and, to a lesser extent, arguments about causation and examples, are most likely to shift a person's view, while arguments about relevance are the least. Finally, our methods reveal a gradient of argument-making preferences among users: a two-axis model, of "personal--impersonal" and "concrete--abstract", can account for nearly 80% of the strategy variance between individuals.