# Investigating Human Values in Online Communities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14177 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14177/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [ValueScope: Unveiling Implicit Norms and Values via Return Potential Model of Social Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02472/) (2024)
- [Revealing Fine-Grained Values and Opinions in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19238/) (2024)
- [AdAEM: An Adaptively and Automated Extensible Measurement of LLMs' Value Difference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13531/) (2025)
- [Value Alignment of Social Media Ranking Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14434/) (2025)
- [Human Values in a Single Sentence: Moral Presence, Hierarchies, and Transformer Ensembles on the Schwartz Continuum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14172/) (2026)
- [Do Schwartz Higher-Order Values Help Sentence-Level Human Value Detection? A Study of Hierarchical Gating and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00913/) (2026)
- [Measuring Human Value Expression in Social Media Texts: Calibrated LLM Annotation and Encoder Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11018/) (2026)
- [Splits! Flexible Sociocultural Linguistic Investigation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04640/) (2025)
- [A conceptual framework for ideology in online discourse beyond the left and right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18945/) (2026)
- [How Value Induction Reshapes LLM Behaviour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07925/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Studying human values is instrumental for cross-cultural research, enabling a better understanding of preferences and behaviour of society at large and communities therein. To study the dynamics of communities online, we propose a method to computationally analyse values present on Reddit. Our method allows analysis at scale, complementing survey based approaches. We train a value relevance and a value polarity classifier, which we thoroughly evaluate using in-domain and out-of-domain human annotations. Using these, we automatically annotate over six million posts across 12k subreddits with Schwartz values. Our analysis unveils both previously recorded and novel insights into the values prevalent within various online communities. For instance, we discover a very negative stance towards conformity in the Vegan and AbolishTheMonarchy subreddits. Additionally, our study of geographically specific subreddits highlights the correlation between traditional values and conservative U.S. states. Through our work, we demonstrate how our dataset and method can be used as a complementary tool for qualitative study of online communication.