Toward a Model of Differential Influence in Discussions: Negotiating Quality, Authority, and Access Within a Heated Student Argument

During unmoderated discussions it is commonly observed that some people end up having more influence than seems justified by the actual quality of their contributions. In this paper, we propose and illustrate a spreading-activation architecture for modeling such differential influence. In our model, each participant’s level of influence vis-à-vis others in a discussion emerges out of the interplay of the following four negotiated factors, (1) the relative quality of each person’s contributions; (2) their degree of authority as credible sources of information; (3) their level of access to the conversational floor; and (4) their level of access to the interactional space. We demonstrate the empirical viability of our model by showing how it can account for the dynamics of a heated student science argument. In particular, we show how shifts in the interaction that would perturb specific nodes in a model later affected other nodes in ways consistent with the model.