Identifying Dogmatism in Social Media: Signals and Models

TL;DR

This paper develops linguistic and behavioral models to identify dogmatism in social media, revealing that dogmatism is a stable personality trait and that certain signals, like lack of cognitive signaling, are predictive.

Contribution

It introduces a novel corpus and models for detecting dogmatism in social media, operationalizing psychological theories and discovering new signals of dogmatism.

Findings

Dogmatic posts tend to avoid signaling cognitive processes.

Dogmatism is a stable trait across different domains.

Engagement with dogmatic comments increases users' own dogmatism.

Abstract

We explore linguistic and behavioral features of dogmatism in social media and construct statistical models that can identify dogmatic comments. Our model is based on a corpus of Reddit posts, collected across a diverse set of conversational topics and annotated via paid crowdsourcing. We operationalize key aspects of dogmatism described by existing psychology theories (such as over-confidence), finding they have predictive power. We also find evidence for new signals of dogmatism, such as the tendency of dogmatic posts to refrain from signaling cognitive processes. When we use our predictive model to analyze millions of other Reddit posts, we find evidence that suggests dogmatism is a deeper personality trait, present for dogmatic users across many different domains, and that users who engage on dogmatic comments tend to show increases in dogmatic posts themselves.