Author as Character and Narrator: Deconstructing Personal Narratives from the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community
This work addresses the problem of deconstructing personal narratives for computational social science, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset without broad AI/ML implications.
The study analyzed first-person narratives from the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit to identify linguistic and narrative features distinguishing authors as characters versus narrators, finding that 'asshole' characters frame themselves with less agency and positive arcs, while 'asshole' narrators tell emotional and opinionated stories.
In the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit, people anonymously share first person narratives that contain some moral dilemma or conflict and ask the community to judge who is at fault (i.e., who is "the asshole"). In general, first person narratives are a unique storytelling domain where the author is the narrator (the person telling the story) but can also be a character (the person living the story) and, thus, the author has two distinct voices presented in the story. In this study, we identify linguistic and narrative features associated with the author as the character or as a narrator. We use these features to answer the following questions: (1) what makes an asshole character and (2) what makes an asshole narrator? We extract both Author-as-Character features (e.g., demographics, narrative event chain, and emotional arc) and Author-as-Narrator features (i.e., the style and emotion of the story as a whole) in order to identify which aspects of the narrative are correlated with the final moral judgment. Our work shows that "assholes" as Characters frame themselves as lacking agency with a more positive personal arc, while "assholes" as Narrators will tell emotional and opinionated stories.