Abstract
In response to political fragmentation of people, many efforts have been put into designing online deliberation tools that can bridge people with different ideologies. One of the promising designs is presenting contrasting views side by side in the same informational space. We present studies looking at how different deliberation interface designs, in terms of stance display (single-threaded and side-by-side design), and stance expression (with-stance and without-stance), influence the social interaction in online group deliberation and outcomes of online group deliberation. The two studies differ in their experimental design in which study 1 was an online study while study 2 was conducted in lab for more subtle investigation. In study 1, we find that the side-by-side interface design makes people more heterogeneous in terms of stance after group deliberation. In study 2, the result shows that side-by-side may stimulate more interaction, including listening and responding to each other, between group members. We also suggest that forcing explicating stance may make groups more extreme in homogeneous groups.