Two Paths of Conversation: How Stories and Statistics are Associated With Community Engagement in Online Debate Surrounding Vaccine Science Skeptical Content

Statistical and narrative evidence represent two distinct ways of substantiating claims in public reasoning, but does this distinction matter for how people engage with vaccine science skeptical (VSS) content and the discursive spaces surrounding it? This study addresses this question through a large-scale, LLM-assisted observational analysis of online engagement with VSS posts and comments that support or counter such content using statistical versus narrative evidence in the Reddit community r/DebateVaccines . Building on Fisher’s distinction between rational and narrative paradigms , we theorize two paths of conversation through which evidentiary forms are associated with audience engagement with contentious vaccine discourses in a naturalistic social media setting: a rational pathway, marked by concentrated participation and corrective contestation around statistical claims and counterclaims, tending toward a single evidence-based truth “approved” by one-click reactions; and a narrative pathway, characterized by generative engagement featuring broader and more distributed participation, more discursive and generative engagement, and greater acceptance of competing viewpoints. These findings provide a springboard for theorizing evidentiary form as a key epistemic logic associated with how conversations evolve in real-world engagement with contentious, socially consequential issues such as vaccine misinformation, while informing hybrid approaches to addressing skepticism toward established vaccine science.