Brief Introduction to Social Deliberative Skills

Social deliberative skill is the capacity to deal productively with heterogeneous goals, values, or perspectives, especially those that differ from ones own, in deliberative situations. In other papers we describe our team's initial results in exploring this domain, which includes evaluating software features hypothesized to support SD-skills in participants, using machine learning and text analysis methods to recognize SD-skills and other indicators of deliberative quality, and prototyping a Facilitators Dashboard to help third parties get a birds-eye-view of important aspects of an online deliberation so that they can better help participants bring SD-skills to bear within dialogues on controversial topics. In this paper we take the opportunity to expand upon the nature and importance of SD-skills as we currently understand them at a more theoretical level.