Investigating Human Values in Online Communities (2025)

Abstract: Studying human values is instrumental for cross-cultural research, enabling a better understanding of preferences and behaviour of society at large and communities therein. To study the dynamics of communities online, we propose a method to computationally analyse values present on Reddit. Our method allows analysis at scale, complementing survey based approaches. We train a value relevance and a value polarity classifier, which we thoroughly evaluate using in-domain and out-of-domain human annotations. Using these, we automatically annotate over nine million posts across 12k subreddits with Schwartz values. Our analysis unveils both previously recorded and novel insights into the values prevalent within various online communities. For instance, we discover a very negative stance towards conformity in the Vegan and AbolishTheMonarchy subreddits. Additionally, our study of geographically specific subreddits highlights the correlation between traditional values and conservative U.S. states. Through our work, we demonstrate how our dataset and method can be used as a complementary tool for qualitative study of online communication.

## introduction human values have been a useful analysis lens for social sciences scholars @xcite @xcite . applied to communities or individuals, they are used to study political affiliations, cultural integration, human disagreement, economic growth, and human development, among others @xcite . many frameworks exist for studying human values, including rockeach values @xcite , hofstede's cultural dimensions @xcite , and moral foundations theory @xcite . however, studies using these value frameworks often struggle with sample sizes and rely on selfreported surveys to calculate the values of com-val subreddits ac r/startups, r/resumes, r/xboxachievements be r/adoption, r/bpdlovedones, r/petloss co r/policebrutality, r/hoa, r/badneighbors, he r/freecompliments, r/transpositive, r/cozy po r/debtfree, r/geopolitics, r/dividends se r/gunsarecool, r/worldevents, r/combat-footage sd r/antidepressants r/debatereligion, r/trueunpopularopinion, r/nutrition st r/crossdressing, r/hobbies, r/nailart tr r/religion, r/askapriest, r/atheism un r/askfeminists, r/israelpalestine, r/climatechange social media platforms provide unadulterated access to vast and diverse expressions of human thoughts and opinions in the form of posts, discussions, and comments. this rich data source is invaluable for investigating various aspects of human society @xcite @xcite . however, analysing large amounts of social media data qualitatively remains challenging. to overcome this challenge, in this work, we provide a method for computationally analysing human values in language used on social media at scale. our method and dataset supplies scholars with a tool for extracting high level values based insights from a large corpus of social media text, value description power social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources achievement personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards. ## method this section details the collection and processing of our reddit dataset, and our approach to training and evaluating the schwartz values extractor model. ## experiments our experiments serve two primary goals: first, to validate our approach by comparing the values extracted using our method to existing knowledge. second, to demonstrate the extensibility of our method to new topics that have not been previously investigated in the social sciences. we conduct qualitative and quantitative evaluations of our approach in §4.1 and §4.2, to validate our method. then, to uncover interesting phenomena and demonstrate the utility of our method, we investigate subreddits with differing opinions on controversial topics and compare our findings with existing studies. finally, in §4.4, we correlate values extracted using our method to values gained through traditional approaches like surveys and questionnaires. ## conclusion in this paper, we apply schwartz's theory of human values to reddit at scale, offering scholars a complementary tool for studying online communities. we train and thoroughly evaluate supervised value extraction models to detect the presence and polarity towards human values expressed in language used on social media. using these, we conduct extensive analysis of nine million posts across 12k popular subreddits. through our analysis, we both confirm previous findings from the social sciences, as well as uncover novel insights into the values expressed within various online communities, shedding light on existing patterns and outliers that warrant further investigation.