# Exploring the Role of Prior Beliefs for Argument Persuasion

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how prior beliefs, influenced by political and religious ideologies, impact argument persuasion in online debates, emphasizing the importance of considering these beliefs over language features in NLP studies.

## Contribution

It introduces a new dataset and a controlled experimental setting to quantify the influence of prior beliefs versus language in persuasion.

## Key findings

- Prior beliefs significantly influence persuasion outcomes.
- Language effects are less impactful than prior beliefs.
- Accounting for prior beliefs is crucial in NLP persuasion research.

## Abstract

Public debate forums provide a common platform for exchanging opinions on a topic of interest. While recent studies in natural language processing (NLP) have provided empirical evidence that the language of the debaters and their patterns of interaction play a key role in changing the mind of a reader, research in psychology has shown that prior beliefs can affect our interpretation of an argument and could therefore constitute a competing alternative explanation for resistance to changing one's stance. To study the actual effect of language use vs. prior beliefs on persuasion, we provide a new dataset and propose a controlled setting that takes into consideration two reader level factors: political and religious ideology. We find that prior beliefs affected by these reader level factors play a more important role than language use effects and argue that it is important to account for them in NLP studies of persuasion.