Enterprise AI Analysis

Agora is built on a foundation of voice-based interviews conducted with participants who shared their lived experiences and beliefs related to policy issues. We process these interviews with LLMs to (1) predict each interviewee's level of support for a given policy and (2) create audio medleys of experiences and reasoning that support those predictions.

We evaluated the tool with 44 university students in the United States in a fully online study approved as exempt under MIT's Institutional Review Board (IRB). We recruited these students through mailing lists, messaging platforms, and word of mouth. Participants were asked to draft optimal policies on two topics: what the minimum wage should be and whether companies should prioritize hiring domestic over foreign applicants. Participants spent approximately 30-45 minutes completing the task and received $10 for participation, with an additional $50 bonus awarded to those whose policy proposals received the most support.

Participants in the treatment condition reported greater development of problem-solving skills, interest, and perceived the feedback from the tool as more timely and relevant (Figure 3a). They also reported higher scores on measures of 'deliberating within,' suggesting that students felt the full tool was more effective at fostering internal deliberation compared to the control. However, these are self-reported perceptions of learning, not direct measure of skill acquisition, and may reflect engagement or satisfaction rather than true learning gains such as capacity to navigate opposing perspectives. We are currently developing objective measures of deliberative skill development: pre/post assessments of consensus-finding skill and topical knowledge.

Our findings suggest that dynamic engagement with personas grounded in human experience can foster deliberative skill development. Participants who used the full Agora interface, with access to authentic voices explaining their positions, reported greater gains in problem-solving skills, interest, and internal deliberation compared to those who only saw aggregate support distributions. This also translated into higher-quality consensus statements that were more clear, coherent, and specific. The differences between conditions suggest that the why behind others' positions matters: understanding the reasons people hold their views, not just the distribution of those views, appears central to developing the perspective-taking capacities that deliberative theorists identify as foundational to democratic competence [11].