https://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27437/ discussing http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3670 "Echoes of power: Language effects and power differences in social interaction", abstract:
> Understanding social interaction within groups is key to analyzing online > communities. Most current work focuses on structural properties: who talks to > whom, and how such interactions form larger network structures. The > interactions themselves, however, generally take place in the form of natural > language --- either spoken or written --- and one could reasonably suppose > that signals manifested in language might also provide information about > roles, status, and other aspects of the group's dynamics. To date, however, > finding such domain-independent language-based signals has been a challenge. > > Here, we show that in group discussions power differentials between > participants are subtly revealed by how much one individual immediately > echoes the linguistic style of the person they are responding to. Starting > from this observation, we propose an analysis framework based on linguistic > coordination that can be used to shed light on power relationships and that > works consistently across multiple types of power --- including a more > "static" form of power based on status differences, and a more "situational" > form of power in which one individual experiences a type of dependence on > another. Using this framework, we study how conversational behavior can > reveal power relationships in two very different settings: discussions among > Wikipedians and arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. From the paper proper: > Status change. Wikipedians can be promoted to administrator status through a > public election, and almost always after extensive prior involvement in the > community. Since we track the communications of editors over time, we can > examine how linguistic coordination behavior changes when a Wikipedian > becomes an “admin”. To our knowledge, our study is the first to analyze the > effects of status change on specific forms of language use. > Users are promoted to admins through a transparent election process known as > requests for adminship4 , or RfAs, where the community decides who will > become admins. Since RfAs are well documented and timestamped, not only do we > have the current status of editors, we can also extract the exact time when > editors underwent role changes from non-admins to admins. > Textual exchanges. Editors on Wikipedia interact on talk pages5 to discuss > changes to article or project pages. We gathered 240,436 conversational > exchanges carried out on the talk pages, where the participants of these > (asynchonous) discussions were associated with rich status and social > interaction information: status, timestamp of status change if there is one, > as well as activity level on talk pages, which can serve as a proxy of their > sociability, or how socially inclined they are. In addition, there is a > discussion phase during RfAs, where users “give their opinions, ask > questions, and make comments” over an open nomination. Candidates can reply > to existing posts during this time. We also extracted conversations that > occurred in RfA discussions, and obtained a total of 32,000 conversational > exchanges. Most of our experiments were carried out on the larger dataset > extracted from talk pages, unless otherwise noted. (The dataset will be > distributed publicly.) > We measure the linguistic style of a person by their usage of function words > that have little lexical meaning, thereby marking style rather than content. > For consistency with prior work, we employed the nine LIWC-derived categories > [36] deemed to be processed by humans in a generally non-conscious fashion > [25]. The nine categories are: articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, > high-frequency adverbs, impersonal pronouns, negations, personal pronouns, > prepositions, and quanti- fiers (451 lexemes total). Results, starting page 5: > ...communication behavior on Wikipedia provides evidence for hypothesis > Ptarget : users coordinate more toward the (higher-powered) admins than > toward the non-admins (Figure 1(a)12 ). > In the other direction, however, when comparing admins and non-admins as > speakers, the data provides evidence that is initially at odds with Pspeaker > : as illustrated in Figure 1(b), admins coordinate to other people more than > non-admins do (while the hypothesis predicted that they would coordinate > less).13 We now explore some of the subtleties underlying this result, > showing how it arises as a superposition of two effects. > One possible explanations for the inconsistency of our observations with > Pspeaker is the effect of personal characteristics suggested in Hypothesis B > from Section 2. Specifically, admin status was not conferred arbitrarily on a > set of users; rather, admins are those people who sought out this higher > status and succeeded in achieving it. It is thus natural to suppose that, as > a group, they may have distinguishing individual traits that are reflected in > their level of language coordination. > > ...to investigate whether the effects observed in Figure 1(b) are purely tied > to status, we look at communication differences between these same two > populations over time periods when there was no status difference between > them: we compare the set of admins-to-be — future admins before they were > promoted via their RfA — with non-admins. Figure 2(a) shows that the same > differences in language coordination were already present in these two > populations — hence, they are not an effect of status alone, since they were > visible before the former population ever achieved its increase in status. > One way to separate the second issue from the first is to look at differences > in coordination between users who were promoted (admins-to-be), and those who > went through the RfA process but were denied admin status (failed-to-be). > Both admins-to-be and failed-to-be had the ambition to become admins, but > only members of the former group were successful. We investigate coordination > differnces between these two groups during a period when their adminship > ambitions are arguably most salient: during the discussions in each user’s > own RfA process. Figure 2(b) shows that even in the conversations they had on > their RfA pages, the admins-to-be were coordinating more to the others than > the failed-to-be, providing evidence for a strong form of Hypothesis B. > > ... it is interesting to note that the most dramatic change in coordination > is visible in the second month after the change in status occurred. This > suggests a period of accommodation to the newly gained status, both for the > person that undergoes the change and for those witnessing it. > To study Pspeaker, we create two populations for comparison: the interactions > of each admin before his or her promotion via RfA (i.e., when they were > admins-to-be), and the interactions of each admin after his or her respective > promotion. Figure 3(a) shows how the resulting comparison confirms Pspeaker : > admins-to-be decrease their level of coordination once they gain power.14 > Interestingly, the reverse seems to be true for failed-to-be: after failing > in their RfAs — an event that arguably reinforces their failure to achieve > high status in the community — they coordinate more (p-value 0.05; we omit > the figure due to space limitations.) So, suck-ups tend to pass RfA more often than those who don't suck up to whom they are talking to. An interesting analysis, altogether. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
