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In a deliberative landscape where
Why this might be true:
- Deliberation is diverse, many factors influence the outcomes of deliberation, so there are many different types of deliberation and many factors to consider when deciding how to hold a deliberation. While we can have heuristics that are generally applicable, it may be that
- collective trial and error is slow, and doesn't contextualize well - ie, we can
To do this we have a new approach to conducting research
20-50 groups total, the virtual laboratory can collect samples from this many groups in a single# Deliberation Lab
The deliberation lab is a project of the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. The project's goal is to understand the diversity of d
It turns out, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for improving deliberation. Instead, the best strategy for successful deliberation depends on the group, their topic, and their goals. For example, the best techniques for helping a group of parents adjust a school's graduation ceremony in response to Covid might be counterproductive for a meeting between companies planning a joint business venture.
This context dependency makes it difficult for an individual to learn tools and techniques to support effective deliberation. They may need to learn a different set of techniques for each different type of deliberation, and it can be hard to know if the lessons we take from one deliberative context will be helpful in another.
It's also difficult to use social learning to develop useful heuristics, because social learning requires simplification
The root problem is that it is hard to learn tools and techniques that support effective deliberation, because the tools and techniques that work with one
The problem is that deliberation has changed in the modern context. In most cases, we can't rely on years of experience deliberating with the same group of individuals, and having worked learned tools and techniques for facilitating
we don't have the luxury of years spent deliberating with the same group of people to learn techniques or social tools for helping a deliberation go well. Instead, we find ourselves working alongside acquiantances or strangers in ad-hoc groups, and yet we still need everyone to contribute their knowledge, work together, and support the group's decisions.
Even more importantly, the context of the deliberation - the makeup of the group, the purpose of the discussion, and the topic - all make a difference to how the deliberation goes. Techniques that work in one context can be useless or harmful in another.
This makes it really difficult for individuals to use their personal experience to learn how to conduct an effective deliberation with a new group of people. In many cases that matter, we never personally experience enough repetitions of a similar deliberation with a similar group to know from experience what to do. It also makes it hard for society to develop effective heuristics through trial and error - there are just too many different ways we could intervene to improve a discussion, and too many different contexts. This sort of learning won't happen through normal individual or social learning. It will take a concerted application of scientific methods, and careful description of deifferent deliberative contexts before we will be able to reliably recommend an optimum intervention for a given deliberative context.
There are a number of factors that shape how a deliberation unfolds. Some are features of the group's composition: the age, gender, or race of its members; its history of working together; or its partisan balance, to name a few. Others are features of the topic of discussion: Is the topic morally charged? Highly technical? Urgent? Finally some features arise when a particular group takes up a particular topic: Does this group have the authority to make binding decisions about this topic?
Participants can receive training in specific skills or behaviors that enhance the quality of deliberation. For example, they can be taught active listening techniques, strategies for respectful and constructive communication, or methods for bridging differences in opinion. The virtual lab can deliver video or audio based interventions, attention checks, or survey-bassed interventions supplied as embedded Qualtrics surveys.