Status Biases in Deliberation Online: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on ChangeMyView

Abstract

Status is widely used to incentivize user engagement online. However, visible status indicators could inadvertently bias online deliberation to favor high-status users. In this work, we design and deploy a randomized experiment on the ChangeMyView platform to quantify status biases in deliberation online. We find strong evidence of status bias: hiding status on ChangeMyView increases the persuasion rate of moderate-status users by 84% and decreases the persuasion rate of high-status users by 41% relative to the control group. We also find that the persuasive power of status is moderated by verbosity, suggesting that status is used as an information-processing heuristic under cognitive load. Finally, we find that a user's status influences the argumentation behavior of other users they interact with in a manner that disadvantages low and moderate-status users.