Chat analysis reveals how values change across different relationships
Value Faces: Surfacing How Self-Presentation Shifts Across Relationships
Human-Computer InteractionComputers and Society
Summary
People show different sides of themselves depending on who they are talking to, not just in style but in the values they express. The authors created a tool called Value Faces that looks at your past chats to see how your values shift between friends, family, or coworkers. They tested this with 18 people and found the tool could tell who they were talking to better than chance. Users also better understood how their self-presentation changed and reflected on their roles and personal growth.
What this means in practice
- •For social app developers: Add value profile features to messaging apps to help users see how their expressed values vary with different contacts.$Commercial implications: Creates personalized self-insight tools marketed to users seeking deeper social understanding within their messaging platforms.
- •For human resources teams: Use relationship-specific value analysis from employee communication to inform team dynamics and interpersonal training programs.
Authors
Gabriel Koo, Rayhan Rashed, Farnaz Jahanbakhsh
Abstract
People present different aspects of themselves across relationships. Computational work has captured such variation in communication style. But this variation also extends to which principles people foreground or background in a particular relationship--i.e., in the values they express and how they balance them. We conceptualize these relationship-specific expressions of values as demonstrated values. To make demonstrated values visible, we introduce Value Faces, a system that analyzes a person's existing chat histories from their everyday messaging platforms using Schwartz's ten basic human values and produces separate value profiles for their different relationships. In a mixed-methods study(N=18), we find that the resulting value profiles distinguished participants' relational contexts with twice the odds of guessing, while system-inferred differences across relationships aligned with participants' perceptions of those differences. Participants used these profiles to articulate previously implicit differences in how they presented themselves, connect them to roles and changes over time, and reconsider their self-assessments.