Conflict in Comments: Learning but Lowering Perceptions, with Limits.

Prior work and perception theory suggests that when exposed to discussion related to a particular piece of crowdsourced text content, readers generally perceive that content to be of lower quality than readers who do not see those comments, and that the effect is stronger if the comments display conflict. This paper presents a controlled experiment with over 1000 participants testing to see if this effect carries over to other documents from the same platform, including those with similar content or by the same author. Although we do generally find that perceived quality of the commented-on document is affected, effects do not carry over to the second item and readers are able to judge the second in isolation from the comment on the first. We confirm a prior finding about the negative effects conflict can have on perceived quality but note that readers report learning more from constructive conflict comments.