Lessons Earned: Unleashing the Superpowers of Your Staff
Dale Bornstein, IPR Trustee, CEO, M Booth
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Talent is everything in communication. Everyone has superpowers but unleashing them takes progressive thinking. Sounds easy, but it’s not. Magic can happen when you focus on playing to an individual’s strengths instead of their weaknesses. Here are lessons I’ve picked up along the way.
Repot talent into the right role
Too many communication leaders are wedded to the adage, "Out with the old, in with the new." A favorite success story concerns an employee who began as a junior account executive. It quickly became clear that was not the staffer's jam. The employee switched positions, and started working as a creative catalyst. This unleashed a passion for trend spotting and sourcing cultural fuel. Since then, this staffer has become an inspiring culture add.
Read the rest of Dale Bornstein's blog to learn how to play to your staff's strengths.
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Neutralizing Misinformation Through Inoculation: Exposing Misleading Argumentation Techniques Reduces Its Influence
John Cook, Ph.D., George Mason University; Stephan Lewandowsky, Ph.D., University of Bristol; Ullrich Ecker, Ph.D., University of Western Australia
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Cook and colleagues examined the potential for neutralizing misinformation about climate change using an inoculation strategy.
Inoculation involves debunking false claims before people encounter them, so that the reader's first encoding of the misinformation is strongly tied with the notion that the information is false.
Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment included 1,092 participants and tested the effect of inoculation against misinformation in "false-balance" media coverage (media bias often found in scientific articles that balances expert views and contrarian views to present an issue as being more balanced than the evidence supports) regarding climate change. The second experiment included 400 participants and tested the impact of misinformation aimed at manufacturing doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change.
Key Findings
- Participants who received the inoculation were much less influenced by a “false balance” news article about climate change than those that did not.
- In the second experiment, the polarizing influence of misinformation was neutralized by inoculation.
- Warning people about misleading claims and highlighting the inaccuracies and flawed logic behind them can reduce their potential influence.
Read more to learn how inoculation can impact the influence of misinformation.
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Information-Seeking Outcomes of Representational, Structural, and Political Intersectionality Among Health Media Consumers
Jennifer Vardeman-Winter, Ph.D., University of Houston; Hua Jiang, Ph.D., Syracuse University; Natalie T.J. Tindall, Ph.D., Lamar University
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This abstract is summarized by IPR from the original journal article published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research.
Jennifer Vardeman-Winter, Ph.D. and colleagues explored the approach to identifying and engaging vastly different publics. This study provides information for an intersectional approach to the segmentation of publics.
Interviews of 31 women of different racial, socioeconomic, age and relationship backgrounds were interviewed to explore how they perceived their multiple, overlapping identities in terms of influence on their health decision making, specifically breast cancer screening.
Key findings include:
- Publics experience co-occurring oppression and privilege in varying contexts. These contexts could include:
- Representations of certain publics
- Policies that affect certain groups
- Structures that enable or hinder certain individuals' ability to improve their health
- Particular identities that women perceived were constraining to them were their:
- Gendered roles (primarily as caregivers to others such as children, spouses, etc.)
- Socioeconomic status (mostly due to income)
- Race (as connected to income or to treatment by others due to race)
Read more to discover how intersectionality influences womens’ health decisions.
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Responding to a Health Crisis on Facebook: The Effects of Response Timing and Message Appeal
Yan Huang, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University; Marcia DiStaso, Ph.D., University of Florida
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Yan Huang and Marcia DiStaso, Ph.D., studied expectations for a "timely response" to a health crisis and the effects of different message appeals on Facebook during a health crisis.
An online experiment including 502 respondents was conducted. Participants read a health crisis scenario that described an outbreak of a highly contagious disease at a fictitious hospital that resulted in the deaths of four patients, a nurse, and two doctors (the study was conducted before COVID-19).
Key findings include:
- A crisis response posted on Facebook one day after the crisis resulted in greater perceptions of trust compared to a crisis response posted on Facebook one week following the crisis.
- Participants perceived faster crisis responses as more credible, which resulted in greater reported trust and perceived reputation of the hospital.
- Participants who read the emotional crisis response message reported greater trust and perceived reputation of the hospital compared to those who read the rational crisis response message.
- Participants preferred the emotional Facebook post, but were more likely to share or comment on the rational Facebook post.
- However, it is possible that participants were implying that they would share or comment on the rational Facebook post to express criticism toward the hospital.
Read more to see how response timing and message appeals affect readers' reactions to crisis communication on Facebook.
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The Psychological Appeal of Fake-News Attributions
Jordan R. Axt, Ph.D., McGill University; Mark J. Landau, Ph.D., University of Kansas; Aaron C. Kay, Ph.D., Duke University
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This abstract is summarized by IPR from the original article published in Psychological Science
Jordan R. Axt and colleagues tested the possibility that fake news claims are appealing because they fill a need to see the world as structured. Believing that news organizations are involved in an orchestrated disinformation campaign implies a more orderly world than believing that the news is prone to random errors.
A meta-analysis was conducted using data from a series of six studies. Data were gathered from approximately 2,800 responses.
Key findings include:
- Respondents with a higher self-reported need for structure were more likely to attribute errors in news stories to intentional deception rather than to journalistic incompetence.
- Greater conservatism (or less liberalism) was positively associated with personal need for structure.
- Regarding information that was consistent with their personal political beliefs, Republican respondents showed a positive association between personal need for structure and perceptions of deception, whereas Democratic participants did not.
- Regarding information that was inconsistent with their personal political beliefs, both Republican and Democratic participants showed significant correlations between personal need for structure and perceptions of deception.
Read more to learn about the relationship between individuals' needs for structure and their likelihood to attribute errors in news stories to intentional deception.
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2020 Gen Z Media Report: Gen Z Preferences for Postsecondary Communications
Academica Group and Glacier
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Academica Group and Glacier examined the usage of Gen Z marketing and branding resources for postsecondary institutions based on a survey of 1,397 students in Canada.
Key findings include:
- The most commonly used social media platform for Gen Z students was Instagram (95%), followed by YouTube (87%), and Snapchat (82%).
- 70% of Gen Z students use college and university websites to search for information on postsecondary institutions.
- 51% of students use social media or online forums.
- 73% of respondents prefer communications through email, followed by social media (38%).
Read more to find out how postsecondary institutions can best communicate with Gen Z students.
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