# Author as Character and Narrator: Deconstructing Personal Narratives from the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.08104 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08104/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [The Pushshift Reddit Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08435/) (2020)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6297/) (2013)
- [Scruples: A Corpus of Community Ethical Judgments on 32,000 Real-Life Anecdotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09094/) (2020)
- [The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07772/) (2016)
- [A Framework for the Computational Linguistic Analysis of Dehumanization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03014/) (2020)
- [Learning Norms from Stories: A Prior for Value Aligned Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03553/) (2019)
- [How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.3282/) (2014)
- [Mapping Topics in 100,000 Real-life Moral Dilemmas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16762/) (2022)
- [Exploring aspects of similarity between spoken personal narratives by disentangling them into narrative clause types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12762/) (2020)
- [No Echo in the Chambers of Political Interactions on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05477/) (2021)
- [Explainable Patterns for Distinction and Prediction of Moral Judgement on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11155/) (2022)
- [Annotation of Emotion Carriers in Personal Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12196/) (2020)
- [PersonaBank: A Corpus of Personal Narratives and Their Story Intention Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09082/) (2017)
- [Asking the Right Question: Inferring Advice-Seeking Intentions from Personal Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01587/) (2019)
- [Room to Grow: Understanding Personal Characteristics Behind Self Improvement Using Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08031/) (2021)
- ["Don't Downvote As!!": An Exploration of Reddit's Advice Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09044/) (2021)
- [How Do Mothers and Fathers Talk About Parenting to Different Audiences?: Stereotypes and Audience Effects: An Analysis of r/Daddit, r/Mommit, and r/Parenting Using Topic Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12962/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Normative Evaluation of Large Language Models with Everyday Moral Dilemmas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18081/) (2025)
- [SocialGaze: Improving the Integration of Human Social Norms in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08698/) (2024)
- [Riveter: Measuring Power and Social Dynamics Between Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09536/) (2023)
- [Structure and dynamics of growing networks of Reddit threads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04085/) (2024)
- [Moral Sparks in Social Media Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19268/) (2023)
- [Community Needs and Assets: A Computational Analysis of Community Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13272/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit, people anonymously share first person narratives that contain some moral dilemma or conflict and ask the community to judge who is at fault (i.e., who is "the asshole"). In general, first person narratives are a unique storytelling domain where the author is the narrator (the person telling the story) but can also be a character (the person living the story) and, thus, the author has two distinct voices presented in the story. In this study, we identify linguistic and narrative features associated with the author as the character or as a narrator. We use these features to answer the following questions: (1) what makes an asshole character and (2) what makes an asshole narrator? We extract both Author-as-Character features (e.g., demographics, narrative event chain, and emotional arc) and Author-as-Narrator features (i.e., the style and emotion of the story as a whole) in order to identify which aspects of the narrative are correlated with the final moral judgment. Our work shows that "assholes" as Characters frame themselves as lacking agency with a more positive personal arc, while "assholes" as Narrators will tell emotional and opinionated stories.