Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reddit’s subforum ChangeMyView is a subreddit where users post about a specific view they hold and challenge other users to present arguments to change their view. Here, we investigated what distinguishes the most convincing participants on Reddit ChangeMyView, as measured by the all-time deltaboard, from equally active users who are nonetheless less likely to persuade people on the forum. We investigated the most common features of top persuaders and compared them to their similarly active Reddit counterparts. We found that top persuaders were more likely to provide external evidence for their claims and use morality-based reasoning, made longer comments and engaged in more back-and-forth argumentation, were less likely to use informal language in their arguments, and were more likely to show some overlapping semantic content with an original poster’s comment. These findings replicate and expand on previously established effects and may highlight ways to develop more effective educational interventions.