They define deliberation as “the process of thoughtful, careful, or lengthy consideration by an individual”. They further promote this individualistic definition of deliberation—weighing the reasons for and against a given measure, empowering individuals to make informed choices based on due consideration of reasons. Most importantly, they make the case that internal reflection is fundamental to deliberation and focus on it for the rest of the paper.
Because of their focus on the individual, they frame the deliberative practice as inducing self-reflection based on five reflectors:
- Personal: fictional character embodying distinct demographics, aiming to stimulate users’ self-reflection from varied viewpoints.
- Analogies and metaphors: figurative speech tools designed to assist individuals in re-framing their thoughts.
- Cultural prompts: reflective prompts of their beliefs, biases, and personal context
- Storytelling: reflection through short narratives
- Temporal prompts: prompting individuals to reflect on their personal history, life experiences, and past events
These five reflectors were generated by GPT 3.5. It was instructed to generate six textual prompts for each (30 total). “focus on supporting users’ self-reflection on a given topic” and “create three male personas and three female personas”. Importantly, all five reflector prompts are not grounded in real people, but up to the LLM. 12 participants participated in the study, with each taking 66.9 minutes to discuss the topic: “Do violent video games contribute to youth violence?”
They find that reflectors have a positive impact on users’ self reflection and their ability to compose better opinions before posting online. The personal reflector provided the highest deliberative quality, which helped participants attend to different viewpoints and appealed to empathy. For storytelling, participants said they acquired knowledge on the discussion topic by perusing short stories. Temporal reflector did indeed prompt personal accounts. They note that the persona reflector in particular encouraged users to be more opinionated and willing to express their viewpoints in a public forum. They also claim that users perceived reflectors to be neutral, unbiased, and objective guides.
They recommend a few things:
- Use personas for deliberative environments that promote balanced and opinionated viewpoints
- Use storytelling for deliberative environments that seek to solicit feedback on complex and sensitive topics (external reflection)
- Use temporal prompts for deliberative environments that seek to promote individualized viewpoints. (internal reflection)