  Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating
in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that
social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than
traditional media summaries, and that particular types of people may be more or
less convinced by particular styles of argument, e.g. emotional arguments may
resonate with some personalities while factual arguments resonate with others.
We report a set of experiments testing at large scale how audience variables
interact with argument style to affect the persuasiveness of an argument, an
under-researched topic within natural language processing. We show that belief
change is affected by personality factors, with conscientious, open and
agreeable people being more convinced by emotional arguments.
