[Paper Review] Author as Character and Narrator: Deconstructing Personal Narratives from the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community

Salvatore Giorgi, Ke Zhao+2 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jan 19, 2023

Narrative Theory and AnalysisArts and Humanities3 citations

TL;DR

This study introduces a computational framework to disentangle the author as character from the author as narrator in first-person personal narratives from r/AmITheAsshole, using linguistic and narrative features to analyze moral judgments. It finds that 'asshole' characters are typically older, male, and passive, while 'asshole' narrators use emotionally charged, opinionated language to frame stories from a subjective perspective.

ABSTRACT

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.

Motivation & Objective

• To investigate how the author's role as character versus narrator influences moral judgments in first-person personal narratives.
• To develop a feature-based framework for distinguishing author-as-character from author-as-narrator in autobiographical storytelling.
• To identify linguistic and narrative features correlated with 'You’re the Asshole' (YTA) versus 'Not the Asshole' (NTA) judgments.
• To examine how narrative style and emotional tone affect perceived moral responsibility in self-narrated conflicts.
• To contribute to narrative understanding by modeling the dual identity of the author in autobiographical texts.

Proposed method

• Extracted linguistic and narrative features from 1,000 anonymized r/AmITheAsshole posts using LIWC, NRC lexicon, and VADER for sentiment and emotion.
• Classified features into two categories: Author-as-Character (demographics, event chain, emotional arc) and Author-as-Narrator (narrative tone, emotion, opinionated language).
• Applied logistic regression to model the relationship between features and final moral judgments (YTA vs NTA).
• Used crowd-sourced voting outcomes (after 18 hours) as ground truth labels for moral judgment.
• Performed correlational analysis to identify features significantly associated with YTA/NTA outcomes.
• Focused on aggregate, anonymized results to preserve user privacy and avoid direct quotes.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What linguistic and narrative features distinguish an 'asshole' character in first-person narratives?
• RQ2 What features define an 'asshole' narrator, independent of the character's behavior?
• RQ3 How do author-as-character and author-as-narrator features jointly influence moral judgments in personal stories?
• RQ4 To what extent does narrative style, such as emotional tone or perspective framing, predict YTA judgments?
• RQ5 How do demographic factors like age and gender correlate with moral judgments in self-narrated conflicts?

Key findings

• Asshole characters are more likely to be older and male, and they often describe events as happening to them passively, indicating reduced agency.
• Asshole narrators tend to use emotionally charged, opinionated, and perspective-driven language to frame the story, suggesting a self-justifying narrative style.
• Narrative features such as emotional intensity and use of evaluative language were significantly correlated with YTA judgments, even after controlling for character-level features.
• The emotional arc of the character—showing a positive shift—was associated with YTA outcomes, suggesting self-presentation as a victim or growth-oriented figure.
• The study found that the narrator’s voice, particularly its tone and framing, had a stronger predictive power for moral judgments than the character’s behavioral description alone.
• The framework successfully disentangled authorial identity into distinct character and narrator roles, enabling new insights into narrative persuasion and moral attribution.