Persuasion in Online Conversations Is Associated with Alignment in Expressed Human Values

TL;DR

This study investigates how expressed human values influence persuasion in online dialogue, using Reddit CMV as a naturalistic setting and Schwartz's 19 basic values as the analytic framework. Value expressions are annotated via large-language models to produce 19-dimensional value vectors for original posters and commenters, tracked across multi-turn threads. The main findings show that successful persuasion correlates with both pre-existing compatibility and emergent value alignment during conversation, while large departures from a participant’s typical value expression are not required. These results imply that value framing can emerge dynamically in discourse and offer design directions for value-aware online platforms to foster constructive engagement across disagreements, albeit with careful attention to ethical implications and methodological limitations.

Abstract

Online disagreements often fail to produce understanding, instead reinforcing existing positions or escalating conflict. Prior work on predictors of successful persuasion in online discourse has largely focused on surface features such as linguistic style or conversational structure, leaving open the role of underlying principles or concerns that participants bring to an interaction. In this paper, we investigate how the expression and alignment of human values in back-and-forth online discussions relate to persuasion. Using data from Reddit's ChangeMyView subreddit, where successful persuasion is explicitly signaled through the awarding of deltas, we analyze one-on-one exchanges and characterize participants' value expression by drawing from Schwartz's Refined Theory of Basic Human Values. We find that successful persuasion is associated with two complementary processes: pre-existing compatibility between participants' value priorities even before the exchange happens, and the emergence of value alignment over the course of a conversation. At the same time, successful persuasion does not depend on commenters making large departures from their typical value expression patterns. We discuss implications of our findings for the design of online social platforms that aim to support constructive engagement across disagreement.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Example exchange from the CMV subreddit in which a commenter successfully persuades the original poster (OP), resulting in a delta award given by the OP to the commenter.
• Figure 2: Illustration of Schwartz’s 19 Basic Human Values. Values positioned near one another in the circumplex tend to reflect compatible motivational goals, while those on opposite sides often represent competing motivations. These values are the basis for the 19-dimensional value vector we generate for each comment, based on the ratings produced by the annotation model.
• Figure 3: Visualization of how a Baseline Value Vector for a commenter is constructed.
• Figure 4: Effects of value misalignment on the likelihood of persuasion. Points show standardized coefficients from logistic mixed-effects models predicting whether a comment receives a delta; error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals. Initial Value Misalignment, computed from the OP's post and the commenter's first reply, is not significantly associated with persuasion. On the other hand, Cumulative Value Misalignment over the full conversation is a significant negative predictor. Coefficients reflect the effect of a one–standard deviation increase in value misalignment.
• Figure 5: Mean pre-existing value distance between commenters and original posters for comments that did and did not receive a delta. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals. Comments that receive a delta tend to exhibit greater pre-existing value compatibility between participants.