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June 15, 2020 10:40 pm

Why People Are More Honest When Writing on Their Smartphones

The restaurant review that divulges distressing family dynamics. The Facebook post that rehashes an embarrassing encounter. The tweet that reveals a phobia few people know about. On our smartphones, we are quick to reveal private emotions and highly personal experiences to faceless strangers. From a report: Building on her earlier research that equated smartphones with adult pacifiers, Shiri Melumad, an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, set out to determine why we express ourselves in a more intimate, personal style on our smartphones than on our personal computers -- and how marketers can harness this behavior. In research published in March in the Journal of Marketing, Dr. Melumad conducted three field studies and two controlled experiments. One study looked at nearly 300,000 Twitter posts created in a 12-hour span. Tweets written on phones contained 47% more first-person pronouns and 52% more references to family than those written on PCs, she found. "Consumers tend to convey feelings or thoughts that are more private or intimate on their smartphones, which is captured by the use of 'I' or 'we' and mentioning family and friends," says Dr. Melumad. A second study employed 1,380 judges as well as natural-language processing software to analyze a random sample of more than 10,000 TripAdvisor restaurant reviews. The software scan revealed that reviews written on smartphones again contained more first-person pronouns and more references to friends. And, crucially for marketers, they were judged to be more self-disclosing and, in turn, more persuasive. "Smartphone-generated content seems to be more diagnostic of how people truly feel," Dr. Melumad says. "Those reviews heightened readers' interest in visiting the restaurant." The final field study found that people were more likely to disclose personal information in response to an ad when targeted on their smartphone than on their PC.

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