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Category: Project

Description: Experiments. We will conduct two ambitious proof-of-concept studies to answer how affect, emotion, and sentiment influence debate about contentious topics: 1. An analysis of existing debate networks. We will compare a reply- and retweet-network from Twitter with a debate network retrieved from the Rbutr online argumentation system. This analysis will compare indices of the quality of debate, such as sentiment and grammatical sophistication, in these two corpora. 2. A large (N=1600) experiment with end-users to study how emotionally-charged debate about contentious topics like immigration can engage or disengage numeracy and other critical thinking capacities. Controlling for numeracy (high vs. low) and political orientation (conservative vs. liberal), we will study the efficacy of a critical thinking intervention (with vs. active control) on participants’ ability to interpret data and figures. The resulting 2x2x2 design will have approximately 200 participants per cell. This number ensures sufficient statistical power for robust analysis given the expected diversity between participants w.r.t. orientation and numeracy.