Posted 05/30/12 04:58:00 pm The recent success of Double Fine and InXile on Kickstarter has elevated the conversation surrounding crowdfunding over thepast year from a interesting dinner conversation to a relevantsource of financing for would-be-game development projects.Crowdfundingc includes financing projects through donations onplatforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo as well as peer-to-peer lending networks where lenders poolresources and cut out the traditional middlemen such as banks orcredit unions to offer borrowers loans. The first platform to offerthese "peer-to-peer" loans was Prosper . An important question being asked by game developers is "how can Iimprove my chances of generating more support for my project postedon crowdfunding sites?" I believe a study my co-author, Dr. MichaelCiuchta, and I conducted can offer one insight into this complexquestion: be more positive. Impression Management Research Individuals form impressions when they engage socially with others.This sounds simple, but one can often forget how quickly judgmentsare made of others especially when we as children many of us aretaught "don't judge a book by its cover." Despite this advice, mostdata suggest that we do just that ALL THE TIME. For example,physically attractive individuals receive higher evaluations byinterviewers (Barrick et al., 2009; Tsai et al., 2005), are morelikely to be recommended to be hired (Cable & Judge, 1997),achieve higher educational attainment (Judge et al., 2009) and makemore money (Hamermesh & Biddle, 2004; Judge et al., 2009). Evenchildren cannot escape the "halo" effect ofattractiveness--attractive children are treated more favorably byadults than their less attractive peers (Langlois et al., 2000). The reliable and robust effect of attractiveness persists becausethese judgments require very little attention and are almostimmediately apparent in social interactions. What's more, you and Imay make these judgments without even knowing it through a processcalled "priming." Priming operates below our conscious awarenessthrough the incidental activation of mental representations byenvironmental stimuli (Bargh et al., 1996). Dr. Robert Baron andhis colleagues examined the direct link between the attractivenessof an entrepreneur and how investors perceive their ideas. Theyfound that attractive individuals generate more positive moods ininvestors and the positive moods then caused higher evaluations ofthe entrepreneurs' ideas (Baron et al., 2006). The same priming mechanism that operates through physicalattractiveness can also operate through how people communicate.Barrick and colleagues (2009), in addition to examiningattractiveness, also looked at the role of how interviewees talkedon interviwer ratings. Turns out, it wasn't necessarily what peoplesaid, but how they said it that mattered. Even the mere exposure topositive words can be enough to induce a positive mood in a reader.Recent neuroimaging research offers evidence that simply looking atpositive words activates regions of the brain associated with beingin a positive mood (Hamann & Mao, 2002). Priming studies havelong used words to activate attitudes (Srull & Wyer, 1979),stereotypes (Bargh et al., 1996), and even goals (Stajkovic et al.,2006). In a 2008 study, Henry found a positive relationship betweenpositive word use in earnings press releases and abnormal stockreturns. Study Overview My colleague and I were interested in determining if positive wordsmight also influence crowdfunding interactions. We examined 729loan requests from. Each of the would-be-borrowersdescribed their need for the loan with a short description and alsoposted a picture with their loan request. In addition, theyprovided credit information that you might expect to influence alenders decision (i.e. credit grade, interest rate to pay on theloan, debt-to-income ratio, etc.). To determine the attractiveness of the borrower, we asked 8graduate students (3 male, 5 female) to assess all 729 photographsusing a five ponit scale used in previous studies ofattractiveness. The average score yielded a reliable measure ofattractiveness, ICC (3, 8) of .92 (Shrout & Fleiss, 1979). Weused the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) softwareapplication version 1.06 (Pennebaker et al, 2007) to determine theproportion of positive words used in each loan description. The average loan request of our sample was $5,157. To analyze ourdate, we used a survival analysis (Singer & Willett, 2003)which has two important advantages to other methods. Most notably,survival analysis allowed us to take advantage of all theinformation embedded in the 729 loan requests before they become"censored," or drop out of the study because the loan is withdrawnor not funded as of the end of the listing period, information notcaptured by alternative analytic approaches (Hosmer & Lemeshow,1999). Results Would-be-borrowers with better credit grades and offering higherinterest rates to lenders increased the likelihood of obtaining aloan. Turns out, the attractiveness of the person in the photographattached to the loan request did not influence a borrower's abilityto obtain a loan. It may be that attractiveness operatesdifferently online than it does in face-to-face interactions. Importantly, our analyses suggest that increasing the proportion ofpositive words does influence the likelihood of a borrowerobtaining a loan. A 1% increase in the proportion of positive wordsused increased the likelihood of obtaining a loan by 10.5% in oursample. Another way to think about it is that from a mean level of11 positive words, using 2 more positive words would increase thelikelihood of obtaining a loan by almost 11%. Conclusion So, the next time you consider posting a project on Indiegogo,Kickstarter, or trying to raise capital through a peer-to-peerlending network like Prosper, you may want to consider not justwhat you write, but how you write. The pen may be mightier than thesword, especially when the pen (or keyboard) generates a higherproportion of positive words for the reader. --- Bargh, J., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. 1996. Automaticity of socialbehavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotypeactivation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,71: 230-244. Baron, R., Markman, G., & Bollinger, M. 2006. Exporting socialpsychology: Effects of attractiveness on perceptions ofentrepreneurs, their ideas for new products, and their financialsuccess. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 36(2): 467-492. Barrick, M., Shaffer, J., & DeGrassi, S. 2009. What you see maynot be what you get: relationships among self-presentation tacticsand ratings of interview and job performance. The Journal ofapplied psychology, 94(6): 1394. Cable, D., & Judge, T. 1997. Interviewers' perceptions ofperson-organization fit and organizational selection decisions.Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(4): 546-561. Hamann, S., & Mao, H. 2002. Positive and negative emotionalverbal stimuli elicit activity in the left amygdala. Neuroreport,13(1): 15. Henry, E. 2008. Are investors influenced by how earnings pressreleases are written? Journal of Business Communication, 45(4):363. Hosmer, D. W., & Lemeshow, S. 1999. Applied Survival Analysis.New York: John Wiley & Sons. Judge, T., Hurst, C., & Simon, L. 2009. Does it pay to besmart, attractive, or confident (or all three)? Relationships amonggeneral mental ability, physical attractiveness, coreself-evaluations, and income. The Journal of applied psychology,94(3): 742. Langlois, J., Kalakanis, L., Rubenstein, A., Larson, A., Hallam,M., & Smoot, M. 2000. Maxims or myths of beauty? Ameta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 126(3) : 390-423. Pennebaker, J., Chung, C., Ireland, M., Gonzales, A., & Booth,R. 2007. The Development and Psychometric Properties of LIWC2007.1-22. Austin, Texas 78703 USA. Shrout, P. E., & Fleiss, J. L. 1979. Intraclass correlations:uses in assessing rater reliability. Psychological Bulletin, 86(2):420-428. Singer, J., & Willett, J. 2003. Applied Longitudinal DataAnalysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence: Oxford UniversityPress, USA. Srull, T., & Wyer, R. 1979. The role of category accessibilityin the interpretation of information about persons: Somedeterminants and implications. Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 37(10): 1660-1672. Stajkovic, A., Locke, E., & Blair, E. 2006. A first examinationof the relationships between primed subconscious goals, assignedconscious goals, and task performance. Journal of AppliedPsychology, 91(5): 1172-1180. Tsai, W., Chen, C., & Chiu, S. 2005. Exploring boundaries ofthe effects of applicant impression management tactics in jobinterviews. Journal of Management, 31(1): 108. I am an expert from coalarmdetector.com, while we provides the quality product, such as Fire Fighting Accessories Manufacturer , Smoke and Co Detector Manufacturer, Optical Smoke Detector,and more.
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