Verbalize Victimization to Reduce Censorship

How can Americans—citizens of a nation which enshrines the right to free speech in its very constitution—criticize somebody who lies by yelling, “Fire!,” in a crowded movie theatre?
     The answer to my question is at the basis of a study at University of Kaiserslautern-Landau and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: People support censorship of free speech when what’s being censored threatens imminent and significant harm to others. The researchers cite prior studies which document support for censorship of pornography on the basis that pornography harms women and support for censorship in children’s movies of scenes considered as harming the children’s proper sense of right and wrong.
     Information which is misleading threatens harm, and opinions which threaten harm can be considered misleading. But different people often have dueling conceptions of what would trigger imminent and significant harm. In addition, as shown in one of the researchers’ studies, people often view censorship as undesirable in general. What might persuade someone to change their urge to censor a particular item of information or expression of an opinion?
     The answer from the researchers to that question is: A rendition of a true experience of personal victimization which supports the value of the information or opinion now being shared. The researchers’ explanation for this effect is that when we perceive someone as a victim, we go on to consider them—and then, by association, what they’re saying—to be less harmful.
     This technique was shown to be effective in a study involving opinions about gun ownership. The progun experience used was, “Tyler supports gun regulations (i.e., restricting access to guns) because he had firsthand experience with guns when his daughter was hit by a stray bullet.” The antigun experience used was, “Tyler supports gun rights (i.e., access to guns) because he had firsthand experience with guns when he shot an intruder to protect his young daughter.” Parallel results were obtained in a follow-on study concerning views of abortion.
     The power of storytelling was also found in an earlier project by the same team of researchers about changing political opinions themselves, not just views about political opinions being censored.
     Political opinions resist change. New information which confirms previously held beliefs is remembered. New information which contradicts beliefs is ignored or forgotten. The result is political polarization or even dehumanization of those whose views oppose our own. Telling stories dissolved the dehumanization.

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Embed Politically Hot Facts in Personal Stories 

Disclose Yourself to Radiate Authenticity

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Invest Passion Properly in Investor Appeals

An excellent business concept withers away quickly without adequate funding to see it through to success. How should entrepreneurs verbalize their arguments for adequate funding in proposals to early-stage investors? asked a research team from University of Melbourne, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Monash University, and University of British Columbia.
     Key to developing an answer was recognition of the distinctively high risk the early-stage investors would be accepting. The researchers report past studies which indicate such investors want to fund only business concepts with promise of very high payoffs—home runs—and they freely use educated hunches—gut feeling—in their decision making.
     The researchers augment this formulation by positing that early-stage investors are influenced by the ways in which the entrepreneur uses language in the proposal. Of particular importance were the passion in the phrasing and the preponderance of concrete words versus abstract words in the exposition.
     The substance of a proposal consists of statements of the financial, social, human resources, and intellectual capital investments in the business concept which the entrepreneurs have made themselves. The researchers refer to this substance as costly signals, since they involve expenditures by the entrepreneur.
     Importantly, costly and costless signals interact in their effect on investor acceptance. On the basis of interviewing a set of venture capitalists and analyzing investor acceptance or rejection of more than 5,300 written proposals from startups, the researchers developed these recommendations: 

• When there are many costly signals in the presentation, high use of passion helps achieve investor financing. If costly signals are low, stay aware of the danger of expressions of passion so strong that they’re viewed as indicating lying or naiveté. 
• When there are few costly signals, high use of concreteness helps. If costly signals are high however, the danger of concreteness is that it’s viewed as indicating a lack of cognitive flexibility and long-term perspective.

     The researchers caution that the study attended to written text proposals and how there are other considerations for investor acceptance when the entrepreneur’s pitch is face-to-face with nonverbal signaling or in a proposal with the visual design of images.
     Also note these suggestions are specifically intended for an entrepreneur soliciting startup funding. The suggestions might not fully apply with other types of investment or loan requests. There, other red flags apply. In one study, loan defaults were more likely when God or family was mentioned in the loan application.

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Impassion Yourself to Arouse Shoppers 

Set Appeals of Product Touch in Concrete 

Borrow Content Analysis to Curb Loan Defaults 

Crow Pleasure When Crowdfunding

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Lubricate Chatbot Transactions

When a chatbot employs its artificial intelligence capabilities to interact with a consumer in ways mimicking normal human conversation, the chatbot can be presented to the consumer as being robotic or this can be left unspecified. The choice was of interest to a team of researchers at The Ohio State University as they explored shopper hesitations when purchasing a potentially embarrassing product.
     The personality characteristic the researchers selected as most likely to lead to embarrassment in purchase was self-presentation, which refers to a shopper’s degree of worry about how other people will judge the shopper. The products the researchers used as likely to activate self-presentation worry were genital lubricants and antidiarrheal medications. The overall study finding was that purchase embarrassment is less when the chatbot is clearly identified as a chatbot. This effect was strongest among study participants with the highest self-presentation concerns, as reflected on a brief survey.
     The two-part explanation for the effect, which was supported by the studies: Consumers are likely to conclude the chatbot is actually a human unless it’s been specified otherwise. Consumers feel that a chatbot lacks the mind capabilities to judge others.
     The overall conclusion did have an exception: If the clearly identified chatbot is anthropomorphized—given characteristics of a person—the shopper’s discomfort in interacting with this sales agent about the potentially embarrassing product increases significantly. In the studies, anthropomorphism consisted of including a drawing which incorporated characteristics of a woman, although it was clearly a cartoon and not a photo of a human, and by having the chatbot use emotional language like, “I am so excited to see you!”
     Prior work had concluded that most shoppers far prefer interacting with a human than with a chatbot unless the chatbot shows signs of emotional warmth. In their own studies, the researchers found that people preferred an online store with a human service agent than a store with a chatbot agent when shopping for a non-embarrassing product, namely hay fever medication.
     If your online store sells both potentially embarrassing products and ones which are not, you’ll need to decide when and whether to clearly disclose you’re using a chatbot.
     Or the solution might be in the fact that you carry a variety of products. A common way for customers to reduce self-presentation concerns when selecting a potentially embarrassing product is to purchase a bunch of less sensitive products at the same time.

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Ally with Alexa Over Alex for Chatbot 

Remind Consumers of Robots’ Competence 

Anthropomorphize Partners & Servants 

Bare Asinine Oversights That Embarrass

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Lose the Carpet Baggage, Wannabe Senator!

Political scientists have verified over the decades that voters favor electoral candidates with tight connections to the areas the candidates are campaigning to represent. A pair of Boise State University and George Washington University researchers says this home-area advantage amounts to about an additional 2% to 7% of the vote in U.S. Senate races where an incumbent is not running. There is still evidence of home-area advantage when an incumbent is running, but it is less than for open-seat contests.
     This happens in large part because a candidate who has lived in the area for a long time has better established place identity, mastering the principles, issues, and dialects of the locale. The researchers cite the anecdotal example of Mehmet Oz being mocked for mixing up the names of local grocery stores in his 2022 run to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate and ultimately losing to John Fetterman, who happens to have the zip code of his Pennsylvania hometown tattooed on his arm.
     The researchers show how the place attachment generates in voters relatability, trust, and reduced resistance to choosing a candidate of the opposite party. This is especially relevant because the U.S. Senate decides issues on a national level and views of those issues are often based on a voter’s strong partisan identity as either liberal or conservative. The data indicate that Democratic candidates benefit more than Republicans from what voters see as local ties, and Republican candidates are punished more than Democrats from what voters see as the carpetbagging of recent arrival or deceptive representations.
     This set of studies considered only U.S. Senate races. We might expect to see the home-area advantage in other elections, too, where the definition of area could range from neighborhood up to nation. The appeal of being local seen in selection of legislators also might generalize to a consumer’s selection of merchandise or service. “All politics is local,” attributed to Tip O’Neill, corresponds to “All retailing is local.”
     The advice for political candidates is to sidestep any indications you’re a carpetbagger—toting your suitcase in from out of town or mispronouncing the names of the neighborhood grocery stores. When voters these days praise “outsiders,” note the Boise State University and George Washington University researchers, those voters are probably referring to candidates from outside the ranks of career politicians rather than to candidates from outside the voters’ area of residence.

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State Your Best Association 

Augment Political Projection with Introjection

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Elucidate Effects of Dynamic Pricing

If your customer believes they’re being asked to pay a higher price for a service than are similar customers, they’re more likely to generate negative word-of-mouth (WOM) about you. The contribution of studies at University of Fribourg which validate this expected effect is in elucidating the different reasons it happens.
     A common reason for different customers paying different amounts is dynamic pricing, where the marketer moves the price for an item up and down frequently in response to a complex mix of factors such as the popularity of the item, what competitors are charging, and customer characteristics. Dynamic pricing can lead to both price confusion and perceptions of unfairness among shoppers and customers.
     It is these two responses which stimulate the negative WOM, say the researchers: Price confusion is the predominant motivator for generating negative WOM when the services are of a type the customer frequently purchases. The consumer may be seeking clarification and advice. Perceptions of unfairness are the predominant motivator for services of a type infrequently purchased. The consumer may be seeking revenge and social support.
     The researchers say the major managerial insight from their findings is to avoid using dynamic pricing when there’s a high likelihood your business reputation would be damaged by negative WOM. But when done properly, dynamic pricing increases a marketer’s profitability directly, by charging close to the maximum shoppers are willing to pay, and indirectly, by coming closer to optimizing the supply/demand balance. That indirect benefit can be especially important with services, such as a concert ticket or airline booking, because the supplies of capacity and time are limited. If you choose to employ dynamic pricing, mobilize ways to reduce the negative WOM.
     University of Passau studies conclude that presenting an ecommerce dynamic price in terms of a discount of at least 10% from a reference price reduces irritation. Transparency about the marketer’s use of dynamic pricing also proved to be important. In the studies, when the procedures involved the consumer participants discovering the policies and procedures of variation in prices on their own, this aggravated negative reactions.
     HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management researchers find that persuading shoppers to authorize your collection of information about them increases dynamic pricing acceptance. It works because, after agreeing to have you learn about their browsing habits, shoppers attribute more responsibility for a price increase to some characteristic of themselves rather than to exploitive intent.

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Present Dynamic Pricing Transparency 

Cook Up Dynamic Pricing with Privacy Cookies

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Anticipate Fresh Starts at Time Period Ends

People are especially optimistic about investment decisions when those decisions are made on the last day of the week, month, or year, say researchers at University of Toronto Scarborough and Nanyang Technological University. The consequence is a higher tolerance for risk with these end-of-period decisions. The researchers’ explanation is that as a time period ends, people shift their focus toward all that could go well with the fresh start of the next time periods.
     There’s evidence that what generates this optimism is the ending of a time period rather than the starting of the next one. When the researchers asked a group of 396 people to state on which day of the week they felt most optimistic, Friday was selected by about 37% of the respondents—the highest percentage for any of the days—while Sunday was selected by only about 4%—the lowest of the percentages.
     The researchers calculate that almost one out of five days in any year could be classified as being at the end of some temporal landmark. This gives persuasion agents such as financial advisors a fair amount of flexibility in choosing on which day to present to a client an investment option and on how to describe that day to the client. The researchers conducted one of their studies on a Tuesday, October 31. They found that participants’ investment risk tolerance was higher when the day was described as “the last day of the month, right before a new month is about to begin” compared to “a typical Tuesday with the whole week ahead of you.”
     Accepting greater risk is not always good. In another of their studies, the researchers found that in a real peer-to-peer lending platform with a 36-month repayment window, the rate of return for investors was lower for loans the investor approved on an end-of-period day. Ethical financial advisors will use the end-of-period effect only for investment decisions where taking more risk holds clear promise for a higher payoff to clients.
     With this caution in mind, though, consider other ways to optimize optimism as a consumer persuasion tool. In studies at University of Kentucky, Texas A&M, and University of Seoul, researchers were able to influence the degree of consumer optimism by the wording on signage posted in the area. Optimism was increased by signage that appealed to bettering oneself. It was decreased by signage that warned about making mistakes.

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Optimize Shopper Optimism for Price-Quality 

Cross Time Markers for Positive Experiences

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