Designing for Civil Conversations: Lessons Learned from ChangeMyView

Research has shown that people all over the world, and particularly Americans, are divided over many issues – from immigration and gun control to economic and foreign policy. Information bubbles further contribute to these divisions: People prefer to consume content they feel familiar with and see views they agree with. Yet, pluralism and viewpoint diversity are necessary for a well-functioning democracy. In this paper, we explore how we can design interfaces that dial down partisan antipathy and allow users with opposing viewpoints to understand one another. We study ChangeMyView (CMV) subreddit, a community that encourages users to change their opinion by inviting reasoned counterarguments from other members. We use interviews with 15 CMV members to gain insights about the design mechanisms and social norms that allow this community to function well. We also explore how we can replicate such civil interactions between users with different ideologies on other platforms. INTRODUCTION “Cyberspace does not have the power to make us anything other than what we already are. Information doesn’t necessarily lead to understanding or change. It is a revealing, not a transforming, medium. Understanding or change happens, but it is as rare and as hard to get to online as it is anywhere else”—Stacy Horn [24]. In the past few years, there have been growing concerns that the United States is becoming increasingly politically polarized [10,14]. According to a 2014 Pew Research study, Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines than at any other time in the last two decades [10]. Liberals and conservatives prefer to live near their fellow partisans. They say they would be unhappy welcoming someone with a different political viewpoint in their family [10]. A 2016 follow up to this study found growing ideological divisions along educational and generational lines [11]. These results show a divided society where individuals with opposing ideologies are increasingly keeping apart from one another. Americans are divided on issues like gender equality, climate change, gun control, foreign policy, etc. Such divisions preclude public deliberation that can help people make better decisions and uncover new solutions [18,25]. They also hurt communities by reducing opportunities to gain social capital from individuals with opposing views [38]. The polarized views of the public are also firmly embedded in their elected representatives and this prevents a lot of meaningful progress. It is challenging for people to listen to perspectives that contradict their own views [25,32]. Some scholars have warned that when users are afforded unprecedented access to information from around the world, they are likely to exclude political opinions with which they disagree [33]. This has led to concerns that the Internet may promote an increasingly polarized citizenry [17,44]. Prior research has also shown that while political discussions and public deliberation are important for healthy democracies, they face challenges online [17,21,39]. Many online spaces mirror and in some cases, reinforce polarization. For example, Adamic & Glance studied the linking patterns of political bloggers and found that liberals and conservatives link primarily within their separate communities [2]. Researchers have also argued that information filters like recommender systems and search rankings isolate people in information bubbles that further contributes to polarization [35,41]. In this research, we set out to study how interactive systems can help mitigate this growing polarization by enabling civil discussions between users with different ideologies. We wanted to understand how designers can create online spaces where users can have serious but cordial conversation about delicate issues with others they disagree with. We believe that enabling such discussions would help users find common ground, build public trust, mitigate polarization and improve our collective ability to find solutions to common problems. To this end, we chose to study Change My View (CMV) subreddit, a discussion forum where users invite others to change their view on any opinion by providing reasoned arguments. We wanted to understand: What motivates many CMV users to continue being open to changing their view? What drives users to engage in meaningful conversations with people they disagree with? What design features and social norms of the CMV community help its users engage in civil conversations about sensitive topics 1 www.reddit. com/r/changemyview GVU Technical Report Dec 12, 2017 that do not devolve into fights? Does posting on CMV really change people’s minds? To answer these questions, we conducted participant observation on CMV and interviewed 15 members of the community. We interpret our findings in light of social psychological theories of how environmental and social cues influence behavior in interpersonal situations. We also discuss the implications of these findings for designing spaces that motivate constructive discussions on other online forums. We begin with a discussion of previous research in HCI on communicating across differences. Following this, we briefly discuss gamification and Focus Theory of Normative Conduct. We build on this discussion later to unpack our findings about CMV. We then present our study design. Next, we briefly describe the CMV community followed by our findings. Finally, we discuss the lessons that we can learn from this case study for design of other communities that foster civil conversations. RELATED WORK AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Communicating Across Differences While online communities lower the barriers for anyone interested in participating in public discourse, selective exposure [16] prevents people from accessing diverse perspectives because individuals favor information that reinforces their current views. Many online spaces for discussions are clustered into groups of like-minded users [28,39]. Researchers have shown the prevalence of “echo chambers” or “filter bubble” effects in social network sites [12,19]. Associating with similar others can be reassuring, but this tendency can exacerbate polarization. On the other hand, exposure to diverse viewpoints can contribute new information and lead to better decisions [21]. Many researchers in HCI and CSCW have looked into bridging across political differences [4,12,20,21,30,43]. They have introduced tools, interfaces and social mechanisms that discourage polarization by promoting listening and encouraging exploration of diverse opinions. For example, ConsiderIt [25], an open-source deliberation platform developed at the University of Washington invites users to think about the tradeoffs of a proposed action by creating a pro/con list. Added social layers allow users to browse others’ lists and include the points they like into their own list. This allows users to gain insights into others’ perspectives. Reflect [26] promotes active listening and deliberation by adding a space next to every comment and asking users to summarize the points they hear the commenters making. Munson et al. deployed a browser extension that showed users feedback about political lean of their reading behaviors [31]. We build on this rich body of work to consider how individuals who oppose one another can learn to think and behave in ways that may be seen as constructive and improve the quality of their online contributions. This problem is complex and challenging [21]. Some researchers have argued that displaying opposing views can influence people to more strongly adhere to their original position [30,45]. However, on CMV, users often listen to opposing positions and change their original view. We use the case study of CMV to derive design principles that can guide the creation of interfaces that aim at encouraging people to be open to changing their views and facilitating civil discourse