Our Spring Research Forum will be held on Friday, March 24, from 9:30 am to 1 pm. The event will include a keynote lecture from Oleg Urminsky (Chicago Booth) on "The Language That Drives Engagement: A Systematic Large-scale Analysis of Headline Experiments". The abstract for the paper can be found below:
We use a large-scale dataset of thousands of field experiments conducted on Upworthy.com, an online media platform, to investigate the cognitive, motivation, affective, and grammatical factors implementable in messages to motivate people to engage with online content. We map from textual cues measured with Natural Language Processing tools to constructs implied to be relevant by a broad range of prior research literatures. We validate the constructs with human judgment and then test which constructs causally impact click-through to articles when implemented in headlines. Our findings suggest that the use of textual cues identified in previous research and industry advice does impact the effectiveness of headlines overall, but the prior research and industry advice does not always provide useful guidance as to the direction of the effects. We identify the specific textual characteristics that make headlines most effective at motivating engagement.
The event will also include short presentations from OSU faculty – Grant Donnelly (Marketing & Logistics) and Cäzilia Loibl (Human Sciences) – two submitted talks and a catered poster session. The full schedule is as follows:
9:30 – 10:30 am | Keynote by Oleg Urminsky |
10:30 – 10:40 am | Faculty blitz talk by Grant Donnelly (Marketing & Logistics) |
10:40 – 10:50 am | Faculty blitz talk by Cäzilia Loibl (Human Sciences) |
10:50 – 11:10 am |
Student talk by Phuong Le (Psychology) "Inferring Mental Representations of Self-Control Conflict from Abstinence vs. Moderation" |
11:10 – 11:30 am |
Student talk by Jianna Jin (Marketing & Logistics) "Consumer Aversion to Digital Mental Health Tools: The Role of Negative Self-Perceptions" |
11:30 am – 1 pm |
Poster session |