Putting your best pet forward: Language patterns of persuasion in online pet advertisements

This paper evaluates persuasion dynamics of animal adoption using text data from a large archive of online pet advertisements. In Study 1, 184,805 adoption profiles from Petfinder indicated how long a pet will remain online and unadopted. Consistent with evidence from related persuasion settings such as peer-to-peer lending, pets spent less time online if profile writers had an analytic thinking style and advertisements contained few peripheral processing cues such as social words. Study 2 (N = 676,004 adoption profiles) replicated Study 1 patterns and found that adopted pet profiles contained more markers of analytic thinking and fewer social words than unadopted pet profiles. In an experiment (Study 3, N = 987), participants read an adoption advertisement typical of adopted or unadopted pets. Participants self-reported that they would be more likely to adopt a pet and visit its shelter after reading a more analytic and less social adoption profile (indicators of adopted pets) than a less analytic and more social profile (indicators of unadopted pets). Finally, Study 4 (N = 3,245 Tweets) demonstrated that more analytic and less social word patterns relate to increased engagement online, such as likes and retweets. These data suggest pet adoption that begins online is a social and psychological process, enhanced by messages with markers of complex thinking and few humanizing references. Advances to persuasion theory are discussed, underscored by the implications for pet adoption and how language patterns in online advertisements can reflect influence at scale.     

THE USE OF POWER AND INFLUENCE IN A GENDERED WORLD

A review is presented of empirical research on the effects of gender and power on the use of influence strategies in interpersonal relationships. Several variables are considered, including gender, power, status, relationship of agent to target, and the goal of the influence attempt. Although gender appears to account for some of the findings, power and status are more critical variables in choice of power strategies. Because gender is inextricably linked to power and status, the relationship of gender to influence strategy usage can only be understood in terms of its relationship to power and status.     

Rawlsian Civic Education: Political not Minimal

abstract In Political Liberalism and later work John Rawls has recast his theory of justice as fairness in political terms. In order to illustrate the advantages of a liberal political approach to justice over liberal non‐political ones, Rawls discusses what kind of education might be required for future citizens of pluralistic and democratic societies. He advocates a rather minimal conception of civic education that he claims to derive from political liberalism. One group of authors has sided with Rawls’ political perspective and educational proposal, holding that a political approach and educational requirements that are not too demanding would have the advantage of being acceptable to a wide range of citizens with different religious, moral and philosophical perspectives. A second group of authors have criticized Rawls’ educational recommendations, holding that the production of a just society composed of reasonable citizens requires a more demanding civic education and, hence, that the political approach is not viable. The present paper argues that both groups are only partially right, and that there is a third way to understand civic education in Rawlsian terms, a way that is political but not minimal.     

ENGINEERING CAREERS: WOMEN IN A MALE-DOMINATED FIELD

A national survey was conducted to compare the background and career characteristics of men and women engineers differing in the number of years since they completed their BS degrees (0–5, 6–10, 11–15, and 16–20 years). The parents of women engineers were more likely to have college degrees and to be employed in professional positions than were the parents of men engineers. Women engineers were less likely to be married and were more likely to be childless than were the men. Both men and women were influenced by courses and work–related factors in their decisions to pursue engineering, but men made their career decisions sooner than women. Although men and women reported comparable levels of technical responsibility in their present jobs, gender differences favoring men were found for supervisory responsibility and salary among those with more than five years of experience, with the gap between men and women increasing with experience. Men with 16–20 years of experience and all four degree cohorts of women endorsed the opinion that there are better opportunities for men than women in engineering.     

Re-exposure to reinforcement in Context A during treatment in Context B reduces ABC renewal

Previous work from our laboratory showed that intermittently re-exposing rats to reinforcement for lever pressing in a training (A) context, while eliminating lever pressing in a second (B) context, increased ABA renewal of lever pressing relative to rats that experienced only Context B during response elimination. In the current study, we replicated these procedures while assessing renewal in the presence of a novel context (i.e., ABC renewal). Unlike the findings described above, renewal was reduced in the group that experienced re-exposure to Context A during lever-press elimination relative to rats that experienced only Context B. These findings suggest that alternating between contexts associated with reinforcement and extinction during treatment reduces the probability that organisms will respond in novel contexts. These outcomes may be the result of discrimination and/or generalization processes. Moreover, this training procedure may offer a potential mitigation strategy for ABC renewal.     

Environmental Modesty

Despite this virtue's history as an instrument of women's oppression, modesty, at its most basic, means voluntary restraint of one's power, undertaken for the sake of others. It is a mechanism that modifies unequal power relationships and encourages greater compassion and fairness. I use a Christian perspective with influences from Jewish and Muslim sources to examine modesty. The modest person, I argue, must be in relationship with others, must be honestly aware of her impacts on others, must be sensitive to those impacts, compassionate toward others, and willing to hold back for others' sakes. Moreover, modesty is not only a virtue that pertains to sexuality and clothing, but it also can promote virtuous environmental behavior, particularly as it leads to awareness of, and sensitivity to, the effects of everyday behaviors on vulnerable others.