From Contestation to Camaraderie: Structural Similarity Dampens Derogatory Discourse in Polarized Social Groups

Partisan animosity has been on the rise around the world and has been linked to such consequential outcomes as political violence. It is especially prevalent in online social interactions and frequently results in derogatory discourse. The authors develop a novel theoretical account of the network-structural antecedents of derogatory language use. In polarized online groups, they hypothesize that the greater the structural similarity between two individuals, the less will be their likelihood of using derogatory language with one another. They further argue that this relationship will be moderated by the degree of group polarization. Using a node embedding algorithm (i.e., node2vec) to derive an omnibus measure of interpersonal structural similarity, they find support for the theory using a dataset that encompasses more than 25 million comments made by over 1.7 million users in six polarized communities on Reddit. They discuss implications for research on partisan animosity, group polarization, the measurement of structural similarity, and the interplay of structure and culture.