The Computational Anatomy of Humility: Modeling Intellectual Humility in Online Public Discourse

Xiaobo Guo, Neil Potnis, Melody Yu, Nabeel Gillani, Soroush Vosoughi


Abstract
The ability for individuals to constructively engage with one another across lines of difference is a critical feature of a healthy pluralistic society. This is also true in online discussion spaces like social media platforms. To date, much social media research has focused on preventing ills—like political polarization and the spread of misinformation. While this is important, enhancing the quality of online public discourse requires not just reducing ills, but also, promoting foundational human virtues. In this study, we focus on one particular virtue: “intellectual humility” (IH), or acknowledging the potential limitations in one’s own beliefs. Specifically, we explore the development of computational methods for measuring IH at scale. We manually curate and validate an IH codebook on 350 posts about religion drawn from subreddits and use them to develop LLM-based models for automating this measurement. Our best model achieves a Macro-F1 score of 0.64 across labels (and 0.70 when predicting IH/IA/Neutral at the coarse level), higher than an expected naive baseline of 0.51 (0.32 for IH/IA/Neutral) but lower than a human annotator-informed upper bound of 0.85 (0.83 for IH/IA/Neutral). Our results both highlight the challenging nature of detecting IH online—opening the door to new directions in NLP research—and also lay a foundation for computational social science researchers interested in analyzing and fostering more IH in online public discourse.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.327
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5701–5723
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.327
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaobo Guo, Neil Potnis, Melody Yu, Nabeel Gillani, and Soroush Vosoughi. 2024. The Computational Anatomy of Humility: Modeling Intellectual Humility in Online Public Discourse. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5701–5723, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Computational Anatomy of Humility: Modeling Intellectual Humility in Online Public Discourse (Guo et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.327.pdf
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