Can the Communication Style of Social Media Videos Affect Listening Quality and Opinion Change?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies of opinion change suggest that disagreements online can contribute to attitude polarization, increasing the extremity of disagreement over political issues. However, very little empirical literature considers the role of listening quality. Can we use videos to motivate higher quality listening and reduce attitude polarization over social media? We fielded an online survey experiment that answers these questions, using a YouTube video containing political messages and allowing survey participants to respond to the video with a comment. We test whether different communication styles – a more inclusive deliberative intervention, personal storytelling and a less inclusive deliberative intervention, a rational-legal style message—impact listening quality and opinion change. We find that YouTube messages about a controversial political issue have a large impact on listening quality, regardless of communication style. We also find that storytelling can have persuasion effects, but only among voters who do not have an opinion on the policy being discussed. Among those who already hold an opinion on the issue, it is difficult to change people’s minds using short-form YouTube videos, regardless of listening quality.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it