A toy study into the social dynamics and language characteristics of persuasive arguments as well as openness vs. resistance to persuasion.

This study is heavily inspired by this paper.

This project is a toy study into the characteristics and dynamics of persuasive arguments as well as resistance to persuasion based on data from r/changemyview from 2013-2015.

The dataset used for this study can be found here.

Files:

• interaction_dynamics.py: Script to implement and visualize the dynamics of interactions between OP and challenger. Corresponds to Section 3 of the original paper.
• language holdout calc.py: Script to calculate the feature values for the holdout data set in the language indicators task.
• language indicators.py: Script to implement, calculate, and visualize the dynamics for language characteristics between successful and unsuccessful arguments. Corresponds to Section 4 of the original paper.
• language predicting.py: Script that trains and runs predictions on simple Logistic Regression models to predict whether or not a given reply to a post will be successful in changing the OP's mind.
• persuasion prediction.py: Script that runs predictions using the GPT-3.5 API on whether not a given OP will have their mind changed based on their post content.
• resistance to persausion.py: Script that implements, calculates features, and performs tests to determine characteristics and significance for whether or not a given OP will have their mind changed. Corresponds to Section 5 of the original paper.
• sample.py: Script to generate random samples from the original dataset.
• utils.py: Several useful utility functions for preprocessing and cleaning of the data.