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The price of being polite: politeness, social status, and their joint impacts on community Q&A efficiency

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Abstract

Sociolinguistics and computational linguistics literature have revealed negative correlations between social status and politeness in interpersonal conversations. In this article, we took a step further to uncover how social status and politeness interact with each other to jointly impact the efficiency of the Q&A process in online social Q&A communities. Using the data collected from two communities of Stack Exchange, we demonstrated that both social status and politeness had significant impacts to determine the efficiency of receiving acceptable answers. Moreover, while low-status users benefited from wording their questions more politely, high-status users were slightly “punished” for being too polite, particular in professional Q&A communities. However, social status and politeness were not significantly relevant to whether a question could be eventually answered. In general, the social Q&A process provides the conditions necessary for the manifestation of “offline” social norms. That is: individuals are still being rewarded for behaving correctly according to their social roles, no matter explicitly or implicitly. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this study.

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Notes

  1. https://stackexchange.com/.

  2. Please refer the sub-sample regression results.

  3. https://www.similarweb.com/website/stackexchange.com.

  4. https://api.stackexchange.com/.

  5. We removed the questions that never receive any acceptable answer for their answer times (the dependent variable of the main analyses) could not be determined. They were added back in the complementary analysis reported in Sect. 6.

  6. https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation.

  7. https://api.stackexchange.com/docs/reputation-history.

  8. There is some possibility that some of these 427 questions may be answered in future. However, since there has been more than three years since 07/26/2016, we assume them to be very unlikely to be answered.

  9. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/gg602412.aspx.

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  1. Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA

    Yi Wang

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Wang, Y. The price of being polite: politeness, social status, and their joint impacts on community Q&A efficiency. J Comput Soc Sc 4, 101–122 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-020-00068-7

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