The price of being polite: politeness, social status, and their joint impacts on community Q&A efficiency

Sociolinguistics and computational linguistics literature have revealed negative correlations between social status and politeness in interpersonal conversations. In this article, we took a step further to uncover how social status and politeness interact with each other to jointly impact the efficiency of the Q&A process in online social Q&A communities. Using the data collected from two communities of Stack Exchange, we demonstrated that both social status and politeness had significant impacts to determine the efficiency of receiving acceptable answers. Moreover, while low-status users benefited from wording their questions more politely, high-status users were slightly punished for being too polite, particular in professional Q&A communities. However, social status and politeness were not significantly relevant to whether a question could be eventually answered. In general, the social Q&A process provides the conditions necessary for the manifestation of offline social norms. That is: individuals are still being rewarded for behaving correctly according to their social roles, no matter explicitly or implicitly. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this study.

Automated summary

Social status and politeness have significant impacts on the efficiency of question and answer processes in online social Q&A communities. Low-status users benefit from wording their questions politely, while high-status users may be slightly punished for being overly polite. However, social status and politeness do not significantly affect whether a question will ultimately be answered.