Room to Grow: Understanding Personal Characteristics Behind Self Improvement Using Social Media (2021)

Abstract: Many people aim for change, but not everyone succeeds. While there are a number of social psychology theories that propose motivation-related characteristics of those who persist with change, few computational studies have explored the motivational stage of personal change. In this paper, we investigate a new dataset consisting of the writings of people who manifest intention to change, some of whom persist while others do not. Using a variety of linguistic analysis techniques, we first examine the writing patterns that distinguish the two groups of people. Persistent people tend to reference more topics related to long-term self-improvement and use a more complicated writing style. Drawing on these consistent differences, we build a classifier that can reliably identify the people more likely to persist, based on their language. Our experiments provide new insights into the motivation-related behavior of people who persist with their intention to change.

## introduction many people aim for personal change at different points in their lives @xcite . a glance at a list of top-selling books readily yields self-help manuals whose content ranges from implicitly motivating ("seven habits of highly effective people" (covey and covey, 2020)) to explicitly calling for action ("lean in" @xcite ). however, simply wanting change is not sufficient to achieve change. persistence through the process of pursuing personal change is important for actual change to happen, and changes rarely happen overnight. often, research on behavior change focuses on understanding what makes people committed to regular or increased action, such as exercise @xcite , or refraining from certain actions such as not overeating @xcite or not smoking @xcite ). an ever-growing number of technological tools, such as food diary apps and wearable activity trackers, have emerged to help monitor and motivate healthy behavior @xcite . regardless of the tools that they use, if someone is not ready for change yet, the intervention is likely to fail @xcite . stage-based models of intentional behavior change posit that people progress through a sequence of two stages @xcite : motivation and volition. in the initial motivation stage, a person develops an intention or goal to act. a person's intention to adopt better behavior depends on factors such as: risk perceptions, or the belief that one is at risk of a negative outcome (e.g. "if i keep procrastinating, i'll fail all my classes."); outcome expectancies, or the belief that behavioral change would improve the outcome (e.g. "if i can have a more consistent daily routine, i will be more successful at work."); and perceived self-efficacy, or the belief that one is capable of doing the desired actions. in this paper, we seek to understand the characteristics of people who are in the motivation stage of behavior change, and how they talk about behavior change. traditional behavior change tactics focus on convincing people to take action without consideration for what happens during the lead up period @xcite . insight into how people act during these earlier stages can help us better understand their needs and inform interventions, such as recommending social media content that exemplify healthy approaches to self-improvement. they can also help predict later behavior and persistence using early signals. ## related work behavior change. personal and behavioral change have a long history in the field of psychology @xcite . improving health behaviors motivated much work in areas like smoking cessation and increasing physical activity. however, work on understanding how to encourage positive change has expanded to cover countless areas, like decreasing crime @xcite , increasing environmentally friendly behavior @xcite , and enhancing overall well-being @xcite . this previous work has shown that many factors can influence an intervention's efficacy, a person's willingness to change, and which strategy to choose for a given person @xcite . further, an intervention's efficacy may change based on where a person is in their process of change. different stages in the process can be correlated with different levels of attitudes, such as risk perception or self-efficacy @xcite . such attitudes capture a person's estimate of their ability to perform and succeed in challenging situations and are often reflected in the actions that people choose to take or not to take later in later stages @xcite @xcite . several theories of behavioral change delineate stages of change and advocate for interventions tailored to each stage @xcite . self-improvement in online communities. in recent years, many have turned towards online communities and platforms, such as reddit and facebook, to help them make positive personal changes. the anonymity available in online discussions helps combat fears of stigma or lack of understanding @xcite . this relative freedom of expression enables researchers to analyze how people seek help through online channels and what they seek @xcite . people join online communities to obtain support from those with similar experiences @xcite , to ask for guidance and resources @xcite , and to seek accountability @xcite . such support can lead to higher perceived self-efficacy @xcite . however, as noted by prior work in behavior change, the type of help needed can be highly dependent on one's personal characteristics and situation. in our work, we seek to better understand this using reddit. there has been considerable effort spent on learning about people's demographic attributes from social media posts @xcite . work has also targeted internal attributes, such as personality and value, which can be more difficult to extract but can provide richer features for downstream tasks @xcite . however, few have studied general intentional personal change efforts based on social media posts. we tackle uncovering the underlying linguistic characteristics of those who maintain persistent interest in self-improvement. ## data we focus on a reddit community called r/getdisciplined, where people seek and give advice about how to achieve life goals and build better habits. this community boasts over 768,000 members as of march 2021 and is one of the largest self-improvement subreddits on reddit. whereas most self-improvement groups target specific behaviors or goals, such as exercising, losing weight, dieting, or improving mental health, this subreddit targets improving general mental habits. for instance, people ask questions such as "how do i relearn doing things just for fun?" and "how do i stop caring about people and craving their attention?" as opposed to questions that are more specific to activities like "tips for increasing strength in arms?" or "how do i eat properly?" each submission, or original post that is not a comment, must designate the intent of the post using a set of specific tags. one can seek advice ( 1 . from the submissions, we can see clear distinctions between people who seek help. in the first submission, the author expresses that they think a negative trait, procrastination, is probably a set part of their personality and that they do not believe in themselves, resulting in expression of negative emotions ("mildly depressed"). on the other hand, the second submission seeking advice does not make any self-deprecating statements and asks only for productivity tips ("producing quality work"). this implies that they believe in their ability to change their habits with guidance. across all submissions, it is clear that the writers have made concerted efforts to understand their own behavior. we focus on people who join r/getdisciplined and then become active during a period of five months, from 2017/1 to 2017/5. these are people who had an initial intent to change which turned into continued engagement and persistent intent. 1 we categorize people as persistently active in the subreddit, or persistent, if they have posted at least four or more times in the given five months. 2 only people who have posted in three unique months before and after the target period, respectively, are considered. this pre-processing ensures that there is sufficient data for analysis before, during, and after each person's participation in r/getdisciplined. we then randomly sample an equal number of nonpersistent people, or people who have posted only once in the 5 months, with the same requirement for posts before and after. ## characteristics of persistent interest in change we address the study's questions about persistence in personal change by analyzing the discussed topics, the linguistic style, and the expressed emotions in reddit posts. we analyze both their general behavior on reddit prior to joining r/getdisciplined as well as their initial behavior within r/getdisciplined. investigating how people act before joining r/getdisciplined helps us learn about the mental or behavioral patterns that indicate a higher likelihood of their intent to change their behavior. as a complement to prior behavior, an individual's first post indicates how they are approaching behavior change. ## predicting persistence in change our analyses have identified that the people who persist in their self-improvement efforts exhibit consistent linguistic differences in topics, writing style, and emotional expression, versus those who do not persist. as a natural next step, we ask whether we can leverage these characteristics to automatically distinguish between these two groups. we set up a prediction task to determine whether a user is likely to become a persistent or nonpersistent user on r/getdisciplined by considering: to provide more fine-grained semantic representation of the post language, we also construct word embeddings @xcite from the text of each post, using word2vec embeddings pretrained on news text. 3 word embeddings are useful in capturing fine differences between words, such as differences in sentiment valence between similar words (e.g. "good" vs. "great"). for each initial post in r/disciplined, we average the word embeddings of each word in the post to generate a per-post embedding. to represent prior posts, we average the per-post embeddings for all posts of each user from the six months prior to joining r/getdisciplined. for readability, we also include an aggregate readability score based on a number of different readability metrics, in addition to the flesch score used earlier. 4 we compare the performance of classifiers that use different combinations of the linguistic features that we have shown to correlate with persistent behavior. our task is the binary prediction of whether a user will continue to engage (persistent user) or leave after an initial post (non-persistent user). the experiments are performed using svm classifiers @xcite and evaluated using 10-fold cross validation. 5 since our dataset is balanced, both the random and majority class baselines correspond to an accuracy of 50%. we present the results in ## discussion the readability of a user's initial post appears highly indicative of their future engagement level. as shown previously in section 4.2, persistent users tend to have lower readability in initial posts than non-persistent users. this could be because they come with the intention of engaging with the sub-reddit, and therefore devote more time to their introductory post hoping for a similar reaction of engagement from the forum. post length is also a strong signal for our models both when we're considering only each user's first post as well as their prior posts on reddit. similar to the readability feature, one possible explanation is the higher engagement with the community through longer posts. users having longer posts prior to joining r/getdisciplined indicates a more consistently personal style of extensive writing and engagement, and therefore more willingness for self-disclosure. the emotionality features provided some signal for the model, but were not as helpful as our other features. however, emotionality features derived from the 1st post resulted in higher recall than those derived from the prior six months, which could indicate that there is more expressed through emotion in the 1st post than in general text. prediction performance was consistently high when using word embeddings, which shows that the latent semantic information in embeddings is helpful. however, it is not significantly better than the other top features, indicating that there is room for improvement in representing more subtle linguistic information such as intent or attitude. topical content features derived through lda were among the best performing features for activity from the prior 6 months, while a user's subreddit activity history was less predictive. the subreddits in which someone participates might be too coarsegrained for our task, whereas topic models can better capture the fine-grained behavior that relates to self-improvement and mindset. our results demonstrate how people with persistent interest in personal change act differently from those who do not maintain persistent interest. our analyses showed that those with persistent change intent had higher prior engagement with topics that foster personal change, such as education. this kind of behavior represents a form of gathering information related to the intended form of change. information gathering is an important aspect of a person's reflecting and considering their motivation for potential future change @xcite . in addition to topics, we revealed differences in linguistic style between the two groups of people. persistent users tended to have longer initial posts with lower readability. implications for tailored interventions we can use our findings and further work to tai-lor behavior change interventions towards people with different characteristics. those characterized with lower persistence may be in an earlier behavior change stage, necessitating a different approach than those in later stages @xcite . for example, a social intervention could consist of a community moderator, or persistent community member, being paired with a likely non-persistent member (based on language use) to encourage them to stay committed to their goal @xcite . alternatively, a community-based intervention system could automatically recommend posts from persistent people, for the non-persistent people to read as a way to learn how to approach change in a healthier way @xcite . ## conclusion in this paper, we explored the behavior of users from an online community, r/getdisciplined, as a proxy for measuring persistent intent towards personal change. by analyzing user behavior prior to and immediately after joining the community, we showed quantitative differences between users who sustained intent towards general self-initiated change versus those who did not. those who have persistent intent tended to engage more with change-oriented topics such as education even prior to expressing explicit intent to change. we then leveraged these linguistic characteristics to build predictive models that were able to automatically distinguish people who continued engagement in r/getdisciplined and sustained their intent for self-improvement from those who did not continue, even before their first post. our results provide actionable insight for research areas that investigate behavior change. understanding the underlying mechanisms associated with persistence in change can support the development of new approaches to help people change for the better.