Intergroup bias shapes social judgments and empathy in Reddit comments
Intergroup Bias Predicts Expressions of Social Judgment and Empathy in the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community
Computation and LanguageSocial and Information Networks
Summary
People often feel more empathy and understanding toward others who share their social traits like gender or age. The authors studied a popular Reddit community where users judge others' behavior and found that commenters are kinder and more understanding when they belong to the same gender or age group as the person sharing their story. They also noticed that age changes how people respond and the relationship between groups affects judgments in conflicts. This work helps explain how social group differences affect online conversations.
What this means in practice
- •For online community managers: Detect and understand bias patterns in user comments to improve moderation and foster fairer discussions in social platforms.
- •For social media platform designers: Design features that account for intergroup biases to encourage more balanced empathy and reduce polarizing judgments in user interactions.
Authors
Yu Hou, Hal Daumé, Rachel Rudinger
Abstract
People share and understand others' experiences differently based on their social identities; often, people empathize more when the other person belongs to their ingroup compared to an outgroup. While this intergroup empathy gap is well-studied in social psychology, it remains unclear how it manifests in naturally occurring online social interactions. To this end, we measure how commenters express social judgments, as an indirect outcome of their understanding towards the posters, and empathy in text, based on whether commenters share the poster's gender or are of similar ages. We focus on posts where the poster self-reports these demographics, and analyze 126,716 comments associated with 36,163 posts from 18,111 commenters in r/AmItheAsshole, while controlling for commenter and poster group identities, post features (topic, length, and score), and both commenter- and post-level variance. Our results show that when commenters and posters are ingroup, in either gender or age, commenters are more likely to provide a Not the Asshole verdict and show greater text-based understanding as measured by LLMs. We also observe that older commenters behave differently from younger ones. Furthermore, in a subset of posts where the gender and age of the other party in the conflict are explicitly mentioned, we find that commenter-poster ingroup effects are moderated by the group relationships between the poster and the other party when commenters make social judgments. Our work highlights the importance of intergroup context and social group nuances in understanding online discourse.