The Virtual Agora Project - JPD in the News

Two websites are now available providing detailed information from the Virtual Agora Project, one of the most extensive research projects previously conducted on online and face-to-face deliberation.  The project was undertaken by the Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society at Carnegie Mellon University from 2004 to 2006 and was funded by a $2.1 million National Science Foundation grant.  Five-hundred and sixty-eight representative Pittsburgh residents were given computers to participate in a nine month long experiment in deliberative democratic community.  They engaged in a one-day face-to-face and online deliberation and were given computers to continue to deliberate from home over the remaining months of the experiment.  The new website at http://virtualagora.org provides an overview of the project.  The website at http://www.geocities.com/pmuhl78 provides abstracts of research findings and downloadable papers and reports that examine these findings in greater detail.

The project yielded a substantial body of data that is still being evaluated.  Recent findings uncovered with this data include:  1) Cooperative engagement as opposed to strategic manipulation is exceedingly prominent in deliberation and is enhanced by reminders of collective identity.  Certain types of people are more likely to be cooperative.  2) Deliberation appreciably alters attitudes, but these changes wash out across discussion groups.  This suggests a need for discussion groups to coordinate their reasoning, which might be accomplished by particular techniques such as multi-level deliberation.  3) The effect of altruistic considerations on final opinions is enhanced by reminders of collective identity, particularly for online discussion.  4) Deliberation significantly reduces authoritarian political reasoning.  More information about these papers can be found on the geocities website mentioned above.