Researchers doing work in online discourse and decision making¶

Computational analysis of online conversation and deliberation¶

Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil (Department of Information Science, Cornell University) studies the dynamics of online conversations, including how confidence and competence shape group decision-making discussions. Lillian Lee and Liye Fu, both in Cornell's Computer Science department, are frequent collaborators on this work — their study on confidence and competence examined effects on online decision-making discussions.

James Houghton (Computational Social Science Lab, University of Pennsylvania) runs a project called Experiments in Deliberation. He is tackling the question of how to get groups to deliberate contentious topics effectively at a massive scale, with a project aiming to understand how to depolarize deliberations where group members disagree.

Mark Klein (Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT) works on technology-mediated large-group deliberation. His work on "Crowd-Scale Deliberation for Group Decision-Making" describes how recent advances in social computing technology can address the failings of group decision-making, for example through deliberation tools.

Riccardo Di Clemente (Network Science Institute, Northeastern University London) studies the structure and temporal dynamics of online community discourse. His research found that the way interactions on Reddit developed was the same across a range of sporting and political scenarios, with conversations narrowing and intensifying before major events.

Cognitive and behavioral models of collective decision-making¶

Ralf Kurvers, Alan Tump, Dominik Deffner, Pawel Romanczuk, and Timothy Pleskac collaborated on a cognitive computational framework for social and collective decision-making. Several are affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Science of Intelligence cluster at Technische Universität Berlin. Their work argues that cognitive modeling, in tandem with experiments that allow collective dynamics to emerge, can mechanistically link cognitive processes at the individual and collective levels.

Online communities, moderation, and political discussion¶

Yan Huang (Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) studies how online community moderation shapes discourse. He and collaborators study Reddit to explore how subreddit moderator biases in content removal decisions help create echo chambers, investigating a dataset of over 600 million comments.

Yotam Ophir (Department of Communication, University at Buffalo, SUNY) heads the Media Effects, Misinformation, and Extremism research lab and studies deliberation dynamics in online communities, including debate-oriented subreddits.

Computational social choice (formal models of group decision-making)¶

Felix Brandt (Technical University of Munich) is a leading figure in computational social choice. The field of computational social choice studies collective decision-making problems where conflicting individual preferences must be aggregated into a collective outcome, with applications ranging from participatory budgeting to deliberation.

A couple of things worth noting: this field spans several disciplines (computer science, communication, psychology, political science), so "online discussion forums and decision making" can mean fairly different things — from formal preference-aggregation theory to empirical studies of Reddit threads. If you tell me which angle matters most for your purpose (e.g., empirical platform studies, deliberative democracy theory, or computational modeling), I can dig deeper and give you a more targeted list with current lab pages and recent publications.