Slacktivism (Kristofferson, White, & Peloza)

Hello hello! This past week I split my time 50/50, spending half of my time continuing to research and attend my internship, and the other half I began to think about some preliminary studies that I could conduct.

Internship and Research

This past week’s meeting was conducted by a Ph.D. student who had been running studies for the past two years on what she called “token activism.” Her main questions were this:

• How do observers interpret token activism?
• What are moderators of how convincing token activism is to an observer?
• What are the downstream consequences on the perceptions of the charity, observers’ donation intent, etc.?

She then began to explain some of her studies that tested when activism is considered genuine by an observer. She looked at “Grice’s Maxims of Conversation” which outlines the most effective forms of communication (and activism) through four maxims: quantity, quality, relation, and manner. Her results were fascinating. She found that when an observer saw a form of activism as disingenuous it would cause the observer to see the entire cause in a less favorable light. For example, if a charity is hosting a fundraiser to raise awareness for a cause and they post about it on their social media and other “activists” repost it their accounts (token activism), observers who see this repost as an example of disingenuous activism would be more likely to see the cause as less important altogether.

She was able to collect this data by the following experiment: she would offer subjects a chance at a $20 reward if they took part in the study. In the study, she would have an individual look at a charitable repost on Instagram that was deemed disingenuous (her means of differentiating between geniune and not were based on how informed the activists were). She would then ask the participants to state how much money they would give to the charity of this repost if they won the $20 reward. She repeated this same process for genuine reposts and found that people were much more likely to give more money to the charity who’s activists seemed more genuine. This is really interesting and important research for charities because it indicates that it may be best for charities to outline how activists should support their causes. It further shows that in order for activism to be helpful for a charity, activists must demonstrate an understanding of the topic. In other words: high information/knowledge = genuine = less backlash = more support, low information = disengenuine = more backlash = less support).

There is, of course, a lot of variance in this experiment that this Ph.D. student took into account. For example, informational value is not the only way observers decide if an activist is genuine or not. Character measure in relation to authenticity is another way that one may determine an activist’s level of support. For example, if an observer saw two very similar charity reposts, one by a person they admired and respected and another by a person they did not, the observer would be far more likely to donate to the charity that was reposted by the person they admired despite both reposts being examples of token activism. Another domain she wanted to test was the category of the charity/the importance of the cause. I think that this is a really important variation to research because I would hypothesize that any activism is better than none when it comes to global issues like climate change whereas less global causes, for example, a group that wants to give instruments to poor kids, would not benefit from disengenous activism. But this is simply my hypothesis, it needs to be tested before we can come to any sort of conclusion.

Read this article (caption of the attached image) to learn more!

Planning studies

The other half of my week was spent thinking about my preliminary studies. I have spoken to various clubs at DA but have not found one that is hosting an upcoming bake sale. Thus, I have decided to start my research in the DA store unless I can find a club who is hosting a bake sale. I am planning on asking the people who work in the store if I can play different types of music on four different days (without a food truck later that day) during tutorial and compare the total grosses. The first day I plan on collecting my control data from a day with no music. The second day I will play slow, relaxing music with no words. The third day, I will play more upbeat music. On the fourth day I want to test if school specific music, for example, the XVI Hours CD or a recording of the DA band playing at a basketball game, will make consumers feel more school spirit and thus, encourage them to buy more. I want to test this because this past weekend I was visiting the University of Michigan with my mom and found that most of the stores, especially the team stores, were playing the Michigan fight song and other school related songs which in turn caused me to feel very Wolverine-ish and prompted me to buy more Michigan swag. I wonder if this phenomenon will carry over to DA and encourage people to buy more Cavalier merch?

Thanks for reading. See ya next week!