Linguistic Agency and Causality in Support Seeking: Effects on Politeness in Online Support Messages

Online support communities play an important role in providing access to quality social support. Additionally, those who experience health concerns that face social stigma, such as depression, are more likely to seek support online. To identify effective strategies that help individuals seeking support for depression receive high-quality social support online, we explore the role of two linguistic features in encouraging polite responses to their posts. This study employed a 2 (agency: human vs. depression) × 2 (causality: biological vs. nonbiological) factorial design. The politeness package for R was used to identify linguistic indicators of negative politeness and our results demonstrated that attributions of agency and causality did not have a significant direct effect on the prevalence of negative politeness in support responses. This suggests that support seekers’ understanding of the etiology of depression, and how they present it to support providers, has little impact on the quality of support provided in terms of negative politeness.