Summary:
The article, “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” is a very interesting and intriguing article. It aims to look at what are the factors that lead to people who view a Kickstarter campaign, ultimately backing it in the long run. The authors took a sample of 45 thousand Kickstarted campaign and closely studied the effect that 20 thousand phrases had on the impact of a person either back or not backing the campaign. Kickstarter is a platform that allows companies or individuals to start and idea/product and share that idea with a goal in mind with the public. The creator sets a monetary goal of donations that must be reached before the money is then given to the creator to go and make the product they promised to make. If the monetary goal is not reached then the money is refunded to the contributors and the project is not funded. Because of this fact, it is very important that the creator(s) do a very good job in selling the contributors the idea of their product and make you want to buy it. Creators tend to use categories such as presentation of product and idea, goal amount, duration until goal would be reached, and a few others. But this paper focuses on the language used by creators that they hope will help sell their idea/product. The language used was broken up into six categories, authority, scarcity, reciprocity, social proof, liking, and social identity. Through the authors research and analysis they were surprised to find that language is not only a key player in getting a contributor to back a project but is one of the most influential and crucial parts. They hope that these findings will inspire others to research the field and figure out why this happens exactly.
Reflection:
Overall I really enjoyed this article and the ideas it talked about as well as the way it discussed the particular phrases that caused certain reactions from people, be them positive or negative. I think that researching how the human mind works and what specifically draws our eye and makes us confident in something is extremely important knowledge that we need to know. The authors hope that other researchers will continue this investigation into why exactly we feel more confident when certain language is used is something that I strongly want to see as well. If we can not only understand what already makes use confident but why it does, we may be able to find new ways of conveying messages with positive outcomes and be able to better understand ourselves.
Questions:
- What other factors could influence us to be confident in something in other scenarios with more/other influences?
- Is there a limit to the amount of confidence language can give us?
- If it stands that types of language can make us more confident, can it make us less confident to the same extent or maybe even more?
- Would the level that language can affect us change if it is being read versus spoken directly to you?
