Modo de operación "Secuencias de conmutación"

My evaluation showed that VidLyz can effectively assist entrepreneurs in making com- prehensive plans for persuasive campaign videos. One ethical concern of this tool is that whether the tool may nudge entrepreneurs to include certain elements in their videos that entrepreneurs might not intend to include initially. The primary objective of VidLyz is to provide entrepreneurs suggestions that can maximize the probability of success of their cam- paigns. These suggestions may not always coincide with the entrepreneur’s initial ideas for their videos. Theoretically, one may argue that following the suggestions of VidLyz would be a better option in this scenario. But will entrepreneurs feel comfortable to adopt all the suggestions made by VidLyz, especially when the suggestions are colliding with their own? Or will they feel less confident to adopt those foreign suggestions? This may become a “hard to overcome” ethical dilemma for entrepreneurs. Because of such conflict, entrepreneurs may feel psychologically stressed out and such experience can also damage their overall impression about VidLyz.

out to be worse than the campaign creator’s ideas. In this situation, VidLyz may hinder the natural creativity of the entrepreneurs. This is in direct conflict with Kickstarter’s basic goal: a platform that promotes creativity and freedom of thought. How can we deal with a such scenario where the ideas of an entrepreneur are much better than the suggestions provided by VidLyz? I believe this situation will be hard to handle with the statistical model running at the background of VidLyz; rather we need human intervention to deal with such a complex situation. Feedback from MTurkers may be a viable solution in this case since human evaluators will be much more dynamic to understand the superiority of the entrepreneur’s ideas over the tool’s suggestions.

5.8 CONCLUSION

Novice entrepreneurs put a lot of effort into making the materials of their crowdfunding campaigns. One of the most complicated things to make can be the campaign video. Per- suasive campaign videos can increase the probability of success for crowdfunding campaigns significantly. However, making a persuasive video may not be an easy task for novice en- trepreneurs. In this chapter, I identified the challenges that novice entrepreneurs may face to make their videos persuasive with limited knowledge. I proposed VidLyz, an assistive tool to help novice entrepreneurs understand how persuasion factors can make a campaign video engaging to the audience. The primary design goals and components of VidLyz contribute to the domain of building a persuasive system for the end-user. My evaluation suggests that through an interactive interface and guided active thinking, VidLyz can assist novice entrepreneurs in planning an effective persuasive campaign video.

So far, I have described how social platforms can be beneficial for different communities and how we can apply social science and communication theories to make it more convenient for users to interact with social platforms. Interactive technology and effective strategic interaction can enable users to receive much more benefit from social platforms than they could do without them. However, these benefits are not free from challenges. Every day, by interacting with social platforms, people not only open up a lot of opportunities and promises but also these interactions may expose us to numerous risks and threats. In Chapters 6 and 7, I have shown how social platforms can impact our long-standing opinion and how behavioral priming can assist us to deal with those changes.

CHAPTER 6: EMPIRICALLY SHOWING THE EFFECTS OF

STIGMATIZED CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGNS ON SOCIAL OPINION

6.1 INTRODUCTION

GoFundMe, a pioneer in donation-based crowdfunding, came to media attention by hosting campaigns on various socially stigmatized issues such as equality for LGBTIQ people and abortion. For example, a campaign was created in 2015 to assist the owners of Memories Pizza who received death threats and numerous negative comments for declaring during an interview that their pizza parlor would not cater a gay wedding due to religious reasons. The campaign raised$842,387 in just a few days [212]. The extraordinary success of this campaign immediately triggered several rival campaigns. One such campaign, that was launched to help homeless LGBT youth, raised$165,975 from more than 4,000 supporters. While seeking monetary support is the primary objective, such campaigns can also present discriminatory incidents related to stigmatized topics to a large audience. This creates the potential for crowdfunding campaigns to shape the opinion of the individuals’ about stigmatized topics.

Shaping social opinions through online media is not new to the research community. Pre- vious researchers have demonstrated the power of traditional mass media and social media in shaping opinions regarding mental illness and political movements [213, 214]. Similarly, while crowdfunding platforms might primarily be viewed as fundraising sites, these platforms contain numerous unique social signals that may potentially impact individuals’ social opin- ions. For example, crowdfunding platforms allow people to see the active support from others in the form of monetary donations along with social media shares and comments. Despite the potential of these signals, little is known about how socially stigmatized campaigns with active social supports may influence individuals’ opinions about stigmatized topics.

In this chapter, I aim to explore how people assimilate information about stigmatized topics when the information is presented as a donation-based crowdfunding campaign. I chose a specific stigmatized topic, fairness and equality for LGBTIQ people, as it is one of the most discussed topics in donation-based crowdfunding platforms (5064 campaigns found on GoFundMe related to the keyword “LGBTQ”). Opinions on stigmatized topics such as equality for LGBTIQ people are often polarized. I hypothesize that people’s pre-existing attitudes toward these topics may moderate how they perceive and react to information presented on crowdfunding campaigns, and to what extent they may change their attitudes towards them.

Often, campaigns presenting conflicting points of view of a stigmatized topic appear on a crowdfunding platform at the same time. Someone, browsing such campaigns, may expe-

rience a sense of cognitive dissonance especially when one sees campaigns inconsistent with his or her pre-existing attitude. I desire to know whether individuals’ pre-existing points of view on equality for LGBTIQ people affect their opinions when the stigmatized topic is presented with differing points of view on a crowdfunding platform.

To this end, I recruited 126 participants for two experiments from a Midwestern commu- nity in the United States using flyers and mass-email. The experiments were designed to investigate how people with different opinions, either supporting or opposing equality for LGBTIQ people, will perceive and react to campaigns that are consistent or inconsistent with their pre-existing attitudes. To preview my results, I found distinct patterns between people who support and oppose equality for LGBTIQ people as they saw these campaigns. All the participants changed their perceived opinions after reading the support for the cam- paigns but participants opposing equality were less inclined to change their attitude than participants supporting equality. Further experiments showed that participants opposing equality would donate significantly more money to opposing campaigns compared to those who supported equality.

6.2 STUDY 1: IMPACT OF ATTITUDE-INCONSISTENT CAMPAIGNS ON A