BC ause: Reducing group bias and promoting cohesive discussion in online deliberation processes through a simple and engaging online deliberation tool (2023)

Abstract: Facilitating healthy online deliberation in terms of sensemaking and collaboration of discussion participants proves extremely challenging due to a number of known negative effects of online communication on social media platforms. We start from concerns and aspirations about the use of existing online discussion systems as distilled in previous literature, we then combine them with lessons learned on design and engineering practices from our research team, to inform the design of an easy-to-use tool (BCause.app) that enables higher quality discussions than traditional social media. We describe the design of this tool, highlighting the main interaction features that distinguish it from common social media, namely: i. the low-cost argumentation structuring of the conversations with direct replies; ii. and the distinctive use of reflective feedback rather than appreciative-only feedback. We then present the results of a controlled A/B experiment in which we show that the presence of argumentative and cognitive reflective discussion elements produces better social interaction with less polarization and promotes a more cohesive discussion than common social media-like interactions.

## introduction deliberation is the process of careful discussion before decision, and it can be defined as the thorough dialogical assessment of the reasons for and against a measure before a decision is made. when teams are geographically distributed, decision making is made more difficult by the fact that these thorough conversations cannot happen face-to-face, with people sitting in the same room. deliberation is therefore carried out online, with social media and online discussion technologies, that are generally limited in features, are not designed to support decision making, and often produce polarisation, division and conflict @xcite @xcite . this is due to a series of well-known negative effects of online communication on social media discussion platforms such as the "echo chamber" effect and the activation of biased information dynamics @xcite . research evidence clearly indicates that people tend to select information from people who hold similar positions and support similar worldviews @xcite . on this account, social media companies, that seek consumers satisfaction in the first place, have designed social media platforms to recommend content on the base of similarity, popularity and agreementonly principles @xcite . this implies that diversity of opinions and disagreement is "by design" less likely to be found in the same social media endeavour, creating platform islands, group think and isolation effects. this combination of homophily and lack of content variety has proved to degrade the quality, balance and safety @xcite of online discourse, up to undermining social tolerance @xcite . in this paper, we describe the initial design and evaluation of a new platform for online deliberation bcause foot_0 , designed to be highly usable yet enable higher quality discussions than traditional social media. we present a user study and a/b tests that show how bcause improves engagement and collaboration while reducing group bias in online discussions. ## background knowledge online deliberation focuses on the challenge of sustaining discourse and collaborative knowledge construction through crowdsourcing unstructured contributions to online dialogue. as a field of research, it plays a crucial role in understanding and implementing new deliberative citizenship prac-tices @xcite . in its most empowering interpretations, online deliberation research and practice should be intrinsically driven by the effort to produce democratically reflective citizens and to "align with the less powerful rather than reproduce the power of the already dominant" @xcite . research on online deliberation is thus strongly linked to democratic values and aspirations and focuses on a bottom-up view of responsible citizenship and civic behavior @xcite . a comprehensive review of the literature on online deliberation found that despite the diversity of definitions and applications of the term, there are six main operating principles that should guide the theory and applications of online deliberation: rationality, interactivity, equality, civility, concern for the common good, and constructive attitude @xcite . numerous technologies have been proposed in the literature to facilitate online deliberation capabilities, from social media to targeted participatory democracy solutions (such as decidim foot_1 , consul foot_2 , loomio foot_3 , etc.). while methods and skills to facilitate online dialogue have already been proposed in the literature @xcite , technologies for structured and quality online dialogue are still lacking. personal e-mail systems, chat rooms, twitter or facebook conversations, as well as most interfaces for deliberative democracy solutions (as the ones mentioned above) are not much different from common discussion forums, where the thread of messages follows the temporal sequence of the dialogue, without regard to the issues raised, the structure of the discussion and the relevance of those issues in the ongoing conversation. the literature on online deliberation argues that topic and issue mapping tools @xcite provide better virtual environments for online discussion because they keep the focus on the issue rather than the time thread (as in normal discussion forums), thus avoiding noise and improving content understanding and navigation @xcite . however, these tools have so far struggled to spread, mainly due to usability issues and lack of capacity to enable more intuitive and inclusive narrative forms of dialogue and deliberation. in general there is a plethora of shortcoming with discussion occurring online. for instance, the diffi-culty to ensure that all participants have an equal opportunity to contribute to the discussion.(e.g. wikipedia edits @xcite . this can be especially challenging in large group discussions, where some voices may be drowned out by others @xcite . moreover, sometimes in heated debates participants get sidetracked or engage in personal attacks. this can make it difficult for the group to reach a consensus or make a well-reasoned decision @xcite . apart of organic difficulties, online discussions can also be subject to manipulation or bias where abusers heavily dominate or direct discussion (e.g. @xcite )), as it can be difficult to verify the identity of participants or ensure that they are acting in good faith @xcite . online discussion platforms can be however a powerful tool for group deliberation, it is important though, to carefully consider these potential drawbacks when using them. specific to this study, we attend the following issues of online discussion: ## motivation this motivates the design of a new online deliberation system which can be highly usable and equally engaging than current social media while providing structure to the online conversation so to improve the quality of sensemaking and collaboration in the online discussion process. our main hypothesis is that the right design decisions on the structure and functionalities would benefit the quality of the deliberation itself and the sensemaking of participants in it. commonly used social interfaces have a great impact in people's political behaviour and decision-making in general @xcite ) -without any design intervention they even risk aiding and abetting hateful rhetorics @xcite . our motivation is to address the challenge for building large scale online discussion platform by exploring new user interface paradigms which combine structuring with usability thus providing powerful technologies for highly usable deliberation on the web. to achieve this we followed an approach that combines two main innovations: we followed an agile development approach constituted in a series of test and learn phases in which design ideas where proposed, prototyped and quickly tested in the design team. this was consisting of two ux designers and two software engineers who specialised in argumentation technologies. in formulating our design, we drew inspiration from established argumentation technological tools; attempting to utilise their strengths and mitigate their limitations. after several test and learn cycles, which lasted one and half year, we produced the first fully functioning interface ready for testing which we describe below. ## design our approach is to design a tool that considers the impact of it on society and individuals and mitigates the problematic phenomena observed in these systems. this is in alignment with value sensitive design (vsd) @xcite approach of supporting human values and promoting social justice. following a kickoff meeting where we used q-methodology adapted for hci (o' @xcite , we set a list of aspirations and fears of our designers and engineers. after establishing a theoretical foundation for the values and principles that would guide our platform's design, we initiated the development process, utilizing iterative design sprints @xcite . a number of the design aspirations identified require systemic organizational actions. such actions are but are not limited to, the facilitation of diverse modalities of online dialogue, such as informal and goal-oriented discussions, the integration of collective decisionmaking techniques within business or enterprise workflows, and the development of an agile system that can be readily adapted to meet community requirements. while those go beyond system design, other guidelines can be followed by making design choices in terms of ux/ui. for instance design processes that allow users to inspect, confirm, dispute and correct past conversations, facilitate transparency, especially in key pieces of information processes, avoid pure argument-centric solutions, employ hybrid interfaces that retain time order and loosely visualize argument structures, are some candidate solutions. this process helped to elicit users' perspectives and finally deduce the following design interventions: ## research question our main hypothesis is that the right design decisions on the structure and functionalities, along with efficient incorporation of computational tools in online deliberation platforms would benefit the quality of the deliberation itself and the sensemaking of participants in it. our motivation is to address the challenge for building large scale online discussion platform while balancing a critical tension between providing advanced computational figure 2: reflection card two stage interaction figure 3: reply dialog box and rendered "quoted" text within argument figure 4: argument input prologued by agreement slider ## methodology to test those, we carried out an controlled a/b experiment with the four conditions: ## results we present in figure 5 the descriptive statistics of the 20 variables about engagement (11 factors) and sensemaking (9 factors) of the 3 design variations along with the control variation (group a). the box error plot data shows the average values of 3 separate trials of 18 participants each. to test variance homogeneity between the three separate 18-big batches, we ran a levene's test @xcite , which showed equal variance among the three samples. we proceeded then analysing all three batches in one unified 54-big sample. upon affirming the normality of the data distribution through the application of the @xcite )), we proceeded with anova one-way analysis @xcite , followed up by multiple pairwise comparisons employing tukey's hsd @xcite ). the anova analysis revealed no statistically significant differences among the factors, which was anticipated given the stringent bonferroni correction (@xmath0.05/6) applied to account for multiple comparisons. nonetheless, it is noteworthy to mention that there was no degradation observed in the levels of sensemaking and engagement, a promising indication that the two interventions scrutinized (argument-structuring and reflective feedback elements) did not introduce cognitive load (information overload). the absence of an information overload due to the interventions as you could possibly expect, is reassuring for the seamless incorporation of those elements. we then carried out a social network analysis (sna) on the interactions graph of each condition and evaluated network metrics, see results in transitivity also slightly improves in conditions c and d. this means that the overall probability for the network to have adjacent nodes interconnected is higher, thus revealing the existence of more tightly connected communities. transitivity number reflects the likelihood that the network's nodes form interconnected triads ((opsahl, 2013)); which is interrelated to reciprocity (the tendency of pairs of nodes to be mutually linked). the comparatively large transitivity number posits an enhanced level of reciprocal engagement amongst users. comparing the conditions with argumentative discussion (b,c,d) against condition a we also observe better connectiveness. number of components is the number of subgroups or tribes. insertion of the argumentation structuring considerably reduce platform island (reduction of 2/3). the dimension of the largest component grows and reaches almost 89 percent of the total graph. considering the largest component size metric combined with the largest component diameter, we can say that participants organised themselves around a large centric group rather than scatter to small isolated groups. this is a strong indication that argumentative discussion reduces the phenomenon of irregularities (islands of discussion) and promotes cohesive discussion. ## discussion though certain pathogens of democratic dialogue are not sourced in the implementation or design technotropy of social media or other discussion platforms but rather a certain reflection of the same problems in the virtual online environment, they are exacerbated within these platforms. therefore complementary to technological solutions for democratic-aware design, ultimately the media and social literacy shall be pursued to address those problems. however in the interim and complementary, appropriate design solution for online discussion platforms should not be left unchecked and unaddressed. for that we demonstrated that even seemingly small design decisions, have a significant impact on the dynamics of the discussion. specifically, we showed that argumentation structuring is a viable and effective solution to many shortcomings of current social media technologies in supporting online deliberation. this is in line with previous research findings that structuring debates around issues and nudging participants have a positive effect, with no significant engagement drop @xcite . second, we showed that reflective appreciative feedback elements and reply interaction, equally abate some of the deficiencies of modern discussion platforms. overall our study findings inspire for a rebirth of argument-centric solutions. after that we have observed an "argumentative winter" -if is permissible to employ this terminology-where people exibit distrust to argumentative technologies mainly because of the steep learning curve and low level engagement, we exhibit a solution that is comparable to typical social media, viable, feasible with equal if not better levels of engagement. this instils optimism of future solutions that will enable healthier and more civil deliberation.