On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 10:12 PM, Gwern Branwen <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
Methodology and analysis leaves a lot to be desired and doesn't really support either their conclusion or your bolder restatement of it. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
