How to ask for Favor

How to Ask for a Favor

A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests

Presented By: Ramaninder Singh Jhajj

Original Authors of the Research Paper: Tim Althoff, Christian, Dan Jurafsky

Introduction• Requests : Act of asking formally for

something.

• Core of many social media systems.

• Factors that lead members to satisfy a request remain largely unknown.

How to Ask for a Favor : A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests 2

Questions• Does the Language of the Request Matters?

• If Yes, How it matters?

• Is it possible to predict the success or failure of Altruistic Requests.

No Incentive in return for the favor


Outcome• Goal was to understand what motivates people to

give when they do not receive anything tangible in return.

• Developed a framework for controlling potential confounds while studying the role of two aspects that characterize compelling requests:

– Social Factors– Linguistic Factors


DOES THE LANGUAGE OF THE REQUEST MATTERS?


Complexities in Requests• What is being requested?

• What the giver receives in return?

• Group Dynamics

• In peer-to-peer, people are more likely to give to

projects what others are already giving to.

How to distangle the effect of

these factors and focus on

language?

(Mitra and Gilbert 2014; Mollick 2014; Etter, Grossglauser, and Thiran 2013; Ceyhan, Shi, and Leskovec 2011; Teevan, Morris, and Panovich 2011; Burke et al. 2007; Wash 2013; Cialdini 2001) 6

Random Acts of Pizza• Online community facilitating sending and

receiving free pizzas between strangers.

• As they say „Together we aim to restore faith in humanity, one slice at a time“


• What? – All requests ask for same thing, a pizza.

• Incentive? – No incentives or rewards

• Group Dynamics? – Social Networking, Requests are largely Textual

• Request Satisfiers? – Single User

What about complexities?


Dataset• 21,577 posts (8th Dec. 2010 – 29th Sept.

2012)• Only users with a single request, 5728

requests.• Average success rate 24.6%• Split Dataset mirrioring the success rate:

– Development (70%)– Test Set (30%)


HOW DOES LANGUAGE OF THE REQUEST MATTERS?


Success Factors1. Textual Factors– Politeness– Evidentiality– Reciprocity– Sentiment– Length

2. Social Factors– Status– Similarity

3. Narratives– Money– Job– Student– Family– Craving


• “My gf and I have hit some hard times with her losing her job and then unemployment as well for being physically unable to perform her job due to various hand injuries as a server in a restaurant. She is currently petitioning to have unemployment reinstated due to medical reasons for being unable to perform her job, but until then things are really tight and ANYTHING would help us out right now.

I [...] would certainly return the favor again when I am able to reciprocate.”

Example

Length : Favorable for success

Evidentiality : Urgents requests are met fast.

Reciprocity : Promise to return the favor


Measuring the Factors (1/2)• Temporal Factors : Temporal or Seasonal effects are

controlled

• Politeness : Measure politeness by extracting 19 individual features deom computational politenes model (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. 2013).

• Evidentiality : Presence of an image link, providing evidence for their claim (86% of images in random sample included some kind of evidence)

• Reciprocity : If the request includes phrases like „pay it forward“, „pay it back“ or „return the favor“.


Measuring the Factors (2/2)• Sentiment : Extracted sentiment annotations for each

sentence of the request using the Stanford CoreNLP Package, count features based on lexicons of positive and negative words from LIWC, detecting emoticons.

• Length: Total number of words in request.

• Status : Karma points, measure whether or not uses has posted on RAOP before, user account age.

• Narrative : measure usage of all 5 narratives by word count features that measures how often a given requests mention words from the previously defined nattative lexicons.


Regression Results (1/2)Coefficient Estimat

eSE

Community Age -0.13*** 0.01

First Half of Month 0.22** 0.08

Gratitude 0.27** 0.08

Including Image 0.81*** 0.17

Reciprocity 0.32** 0.10

Strong Positive Sentiment 0.14 0.08

Strong Negative Sentiment

-0.07 0.08

Length in 100 words 0.30*** 0.05***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05

Temporal Control

PolitenessEvidentiality

Reciprocity

Length

Sentiment


Regression Results (2/2)Coefficient Estimat

e SE

Karma 0.13*** 0.02

Posted in RAOP before 1.34*** 0.16

Narrative Craving -0.34*** 0.09

Narrative Family 0.22* 0.09

Narrative Job 0.26** 0.09

Narrative Money 0.19** 0.08

Narrative Student 0.09 0.09***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05

Status

Narratives


Interpretation

Length : 50 wordsNarrative : Craving

Length: 50 wordsNarrative : Job and Money

Length : 150 wordsNarrative : Job and MoneyIncludes Picture, Gratitute and Reciprocity

9.8%

19.4%

56.8%


IS SUCCESS PREDICTABLE?


Test Setup• Predicting held-out requests (1.6k)

• Model: Area under receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC) – Illustrate performance of binary classifier systems.– Graphical plot.– True Positive Rate VS False Positive Rate

(Friedman, Hastie, and Tibshirani 2010; DeLong, DeLong, and Clarke-Pearson 1988) 19

Test Results

How to Ask for a Favor : A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests

Feature ROC AUC (***p < 0.001)

Random Baseline 0.500

Unigram Baseline 0.621***

Bigram Baseline 0.618***

Trigram Baseline 0.618***

Text Features 0.625***

Social Features 0.576***

Temporal Features 0.579***

Temporal + Social 0.638***

Temporal + Social + Text 0.669***

Temporal + Social + Text + Unigram 0.672***20

User Similarity?• User similarity (in terms of Interest and

Activity)had NO significant effect on giving.

• Did not included user similarity as a feature in the logistic regression model since authors were able to observe givers for a small subset.

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Conclusion (1/2)• Language of requests matter a lot.

• Narratives of request also play a role in success.

• Reciprocity matters : Promise to pay it forward

• Pro-social behavior towards requestors who are of high status.


Conclusion (2/2)• Expressing gratitude is also vital.

• And finaly we can say:

Success is Predictable!


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THANK YOU!

How to Ask for a Favor : A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests

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Data & Analytics

How to ask for Favor