Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions?

TL;DR

This paper explores how differences in personal values influence disagreements in online discussions, demonstrating that value dissimilarity correlates with disagreement and improves agreement prediction models.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate and aggregate personal values from online discussions and shows their relevance in predicting disagreement.

Findings

Value profile dissimilarity correlates with disagreement.

Including value information improves agreement prediction.

State-of-the-art models can effectively estimate personal values.

Abstract

Disagreements are common in online discussions. Disagreement may foster collaboration and improve the quality of a discussion under some conditions. Although there exist methods for recognizing disagreement, a deeper understanding of factors that influence disagreement is lacking in the literature. We investigate a hypothesis that differences in personal values are indicative of disagreement in online discussions. We show how state-of-the-art models can be used for estimating values in online discussions and how the estimated values can be aggregated into value profiles. We evaluate the estimated value profiles based on human-annotated agreement labels. We find that the dissimilarity of value profiles correlates with disagreement in specific cases. We also find that including value information in agreement prediction improves performance.