Detecting and Enhancing Intellectual Humility in Online Political Discourse

TL;DR

This paper develops methods to measure and improve intellectual humility in online political discussions, demonstrating that targeted interventions can foster more respectful and understanding discourse without decreasing engagement.

Contribution

It introduces a codebook for annotating IH, creates a classifier for large-scale analysis, and empirically shows that online interventions can enhance IH across various political topics.

Findings

More/less IH environments tend to produce similar future posts.

Interventions can successfully increase IH in online discussions.

Enhancing IH does not necessarily reduce user engagement.

Abstract

Intellectual humility (IH)-a recognition of one's own intellectual limitations-can reduce polarization and foster more understanding across lines of difference. Yet little work explores how IH can be systematically defined, measured, evaluated, and enhanced in spaces that often lack it the most: online political discussions. In this paper, we seek to bridge these gaps by exploring two questions: 1) how might preexisting levels of IH influence future expressions of IH during online political discourse? and 2) can online interventions enhance IH across different political topics and conversational environments? To pursue these questions, we define a codebook characterizing different dimensions of IH and intellectual arrogance (IA) and have researchers use it to annotate several hundred Reddit posts, which we then use to develop and validate a classifier to support IH analysis at scale. These tools subsequently enable two key contributions: i) an observational data analysis of how IH varies across different political discussions on Reddit, which reveals that more/less IH environments tend to contain future posts of a similar nature, and ii) a randomized control trial evaluating strategies for nudging discussion participants to demonstrate more IH in their posts, which reveals the possibility of enhancing IH in online discussions across a range of contentious topics. Our findings highlight the possibility of measuring and increasing IH online without necessarily reducing engagement.