Exploring Linguistic Style Matching in Online Communities: The Role of Social Context and Conversation Dynamics (2023)

Abstract: Linguistic style matching (LSM) in conversations can be reflective of several aspects of social influence such as power or persuasion. However, how LSM relates to the outcomes of online communication on platforms such as Reddit is an unknown question. In this study, we analyze a large corpus of two-party conversation threads in Reddit where we identify all occurrences of LSM using two types of style: the use of function words and formality. Using this framework, we examine how levels of LSM differ in conversations depending on several social factors within Reddit: post and subreddit features, conversation depth, user tenure, and the controversiality of a comment. Finally, we measure the change of LSM following loss of status after community banning. Our findings reveal the interplay of LSM in Reddit conversations with several community metrics, suggesting the importance of understanding conversation engagement when understanding community dynamics.

## introduction social influence can be subtle. when two persons converse, their interpersonal dynamics can lead to one person adopting the language of the other. for example, in settings where one person has higher status or power, the lower-status person may unconsciously begin mirroring the language of the other @xcite . this process has been described as accommodation @xcite or linguistic style matching (lsm) @xcite and can reflect the underlying influence that individuals have on each other @xcite . past work has primarily focused on how linguistic influence changes relative to the identities of the speakers. however, the larger social context in which a conversation happens also plays a role * denotes equal contribution in determining whether an individual may be influential. here, we perform a large-scale study of linguistic influence to test how specific types of social context influence the level of accommodation. past work in the social sciences has studied accommodation to understand the influence and social power dynamics in specific settings, like job interviews (applicants and interviewers) @xcite and academic context (students and faculty) @xcite . also, lsm has been studied to understand group dynamics @xcite and negotiations @xcite . work in nlp has operationalized these theories to test accommodation theory in new domains. typically, these works adopt some tests for measuring influence in language and have shown these measures correlate with known social differences. however, it is yet unknown how lsm occurs in conversations in online community platforms and differs by community dynamics. our work examines the larger context in which linguistic influence occurs. using a large sample of 2.3 million conversations from reddit and two measures of linguistic influence, we test how the level of linguistic influence correlates with conversational outcomes, such as conversation length and even the continued presence of a person in a community. further, we examine how specific social and contextual factors influence the rates of linguistic influence. for instance, we discover that the controversy level of the parent comment can lead to different dynamics of style matching in the conversation threads. this paper offers the following three contributions. first, we systematically compare complementary measures of accommodation, showing clear evidence of style accommodation in reddit conversations. second, we draw the relationships of several social factors that affect lsm, including levels of engagement, the popularity of the content, and tenure within a subreddit. third, we demon-strate the use of lsm to measure the loss of status through the banning of subreddits. we have released all code and data for full reproducibility. 1 ## accommodation and its measurement in this section, we discuss communication accommodation theory and associated sociolinguistic research to outline the accommodation of communicative behavior based on perceived social power dynamics. subsequently, we explore the concept of linguistic style matching and methods adopted by researchers to quantify this phenomenon. we also investigate various factors that contribute to lsm variations and their strategic uses. ## data reddit is a popular social media platform with a forum-based interface. it allows users to interact with dispersed individuals who share similar experiences or topics of interest. our dataset to study lsm spans from july 2019 to december 2022 and includes 35m users and 500k subreddits. using the pushshift reddit dataset which contains the full history of comments aggregated on a monthly basis @xcite , we construct conversation threads from the comments and filter those that satisfy the following conditions: computational work has proposed multiple approaches for both what to measure and how to measure linguistic influence. in this section, we aim to build intuition for what the two measures of accommodation-using function words and formality-are operationalizing. ## what effect does accommodation have on the conversation itself? linguistic accommodation is usually associated with positive social benefits @xcite . here, we test whether linguistic accommodation is associated with two positive behaviors in social media: sustained conversation and length of participation in a subreddit. ## loss of status via community banning reddit bans specific subreddit communities as a result of policy violations, such as repeated posting of highly offensive content or lack of moderator oversight @xcite . when users are highly active in such communities, the ban potentially results in a loss of status, as they are forced to find new communities to participate in. here, we test the extent to which users change how they are linguistically influenced by others after such a ban. while prior work has studied how users change after gaining status (e.g., @xcite , our unique setting allows us to perform a novel study of the potentially humbling effects of status loss. in addition, a study of the subreddit r/changemyview suggests that formality is (weakly) associated with more effective persuasion on reddit @xcite ; we hypothesize that users who recently experienced a ban may have multiple pragmatic reasons to accommodate more. ## discussion and conclusion in this study, we performed a large-scale computational analysis on reddit conversations to understand when lsm occurs and its effect on platform engagement. overall, do our findings indicate that lsm frequently occurs in online conversations within reddit, and that it exhibits complex nonlinear relationships with conversation metrics such as karma, conversation lengths, or controversy scores, which suggests linguistic influence can affect conversation dynamics. furthermore, we show that the degree of accommodation in conversations is related to greater levels of engagement both at conversation and platform levels. our findings highlight the possibility of identifying lsm as an indicator of engagement and civil conversations and suggest ideas for building and maintaining online communities that promote constructive discourse. in our experiments, we have assumed lsm as a unidirectional concept by measuring the exhibition of a particular style conditioned on the previous turn. however, lsm can occur in several different directions, such as the two speakers converging into a single style or even diverging to separate styles. while not in the scope of this study, the existence of such types of lsm in reddit conversation threads can be studies in future research. this study was conducted only on observational data and did not require any human intervention. we did not use any information that could identify individuals or specific demographic groups, and all of our presented results were obtained through aggregation from millions of users and comments.