The Potential of Argument Visualisation Platforms to Promote Humility in Public Discourse

Traditional online comment boards suffer from significant communicative deficits, including informational cascades, scattered content, and low information-to-noise ratio. Technologies that exploit argument visualization have been developed with the aim of improving communicative quality for online interactions. In this paper, we report the results of the Scholio project http://www.scholio.net/ that delivered a randomized controlled trial to test the effects of adopting argument visualization technologies to support discussion of online news. The first, Pol.is, simplifies users’ interactions with the objective of maximizing inclusion and overcoming the limits of standard commenting platforms that engage only a small minority of the public. The second, Deliberatorium, engages participants in the construction of a structured argument map. Alongside these variations in platform, the experiment also tested an empathy inducing perspective taking treatment assigned at the group level and orthogonal to the platform treatments. The objective of this study is to analyze the impact of the different treatments to engagement, usability, quality of deliberation participants’ attitudes and behavior. In particular, the experiment tracked the ability of different approaches to online engagement to promote intellectual humility and considered judgment among participants. Findings will contribute to the challenge of building online participatory spaces that support democratic deliberation and intellectual humility in public discourse by guiding the structure of such interactions.