Based on research by Eleanor Putnam-Farr and Jason Riis

• How you frame a question affects how people reply.
• Using yes-or-no reply formats increased enrollment in employer-sponsored wellness programs, even when employees weren’t required to answer.
• Initial benefits from the yes-no enrollment question can carry through to program participation.

Imagine you’re perusing your favorite website, and you’re asked to join its mailing list: “Rice Business Wisdom’s monthly newsletter is filled with cutting-edge research that can help you succeed in work and life. Click here to subscribe.”

Did you click? No? Let’s try a different approach.

 “Rice Business Wisdom’s monthly newsletter is filled with cutting-edge research that can help you succeed in work and life. Yes, I’d like to subscribe/No, I’m not interested.”

You have now entered the world of choice architecture, the science of framing questions to nudge people toward a desired outcome. It’s at work as companies encourage employees to participate in retirement plans, for example, and as marketers work to sell services, including online subscriptions.

Different ways of asking lead to different response rates. A non-forced choice means you can leave a screen without answering — and many do. A forced choice, like it sounds, requires an answer. Think about completing employer-required online sexual harassment training. You can’t move through the course until you answer each question.

An even more aggressive technique automatically chooses an option for you unless you specifically opt out. That format may generate public backlash, as it has lately from websites that default to the option of giving away your personal data.

Although the pros and cons of these techniques have been well studied, Rice Business professor Eleanor Putman-Farr and Jason Riis, a marketing consultant and lecturer at the Wharton School, decided to look at the benefits of a lesser-known area of choice architecture: A yes-or-no format in a non-forced setting.

Putnam-Farr and Riis, who was a visiting assistant professor of marketing at Wharton during the study, designed two experiments to see whether a yes-no format would yield more responses than an opt-in. The short answer: Yes, it did.

In the first experiment, employees who were already enrolled in an employer-based wellness program were queried about using an activity tracker. They all received emails with the same introductory text, reminding them to participate, and three different calls to action. One asked them to log in to their program’s website to click the link to the activity tracker; one gave them the option to click a link in the email; and one used a yes-no format: “Yes, I would like to track my activity/No, I do not want to track my activity at this time.”

The researchers found that significantly more people — 13.3 percent — clicked the “yes” link in the yes-no question than the combined total (9.5 percent) of those who clicked it using the other options. A mere 2.7 percent of those in the yes-no group clicked “no.”

Puzzlingly, however, no significant difference emerged between the groups in actually using the fitness tracker. The researchers had various theories as to why this was the case. For one, the participants’ previous experiences with the wellness program might have affected their attitudes toward activity tracking. Furthermore, there was a delay between when they received the email (during the work day) and the most likely time to record activities (after work).

“Our main takeaway was that it was still effective as a reminder call-to-action, but participating once (by logging your activity one time) isn’t enough to lead to underlying behavior change,” Putnam-Farr said.

The second experiment addressed those and other issues. Emails went to employees newly targeted for program enrollment. The researchers were able to study a “full funnel” sequence: those employees who clicked initially, those who went on to enroll, and those who later participated in the program.

All emails contained the same introduction touting the wellness program and mentioned an ability to earn points for rewards. Four different reply schemes, randomly assigned, were as follows. 

1. A basic opt-in directing participants to log in to try the program.
2. An opt-in with emphasis: A sentence noting that each completed activity earns more reward points was added.
3. A basic yes/no format: “Yes, I would like to try the program” or “No, I do not want to try the program.”
4. A yes/no format with emphasis: A sentence was added to the “yes” option saying that each completed activity earns more reward points. The “no” reply also said “Earning reward points is not important to me at this time.”

Those clicking affirmatively in any format were sent to an enrollment page. Program participation was tracked by tallying logs of completed activities, including everything from watching a video to eating more vegetables.

This time, the researchers found that the yes/no format yielded more than twice as many positive initial responses than the opt-in message. They also saw a strong, though not quite as dramatic, increase in program enrollment for the yes/no group. And unlike in the first experiment, they found significantly higher program participation rates in the yes/no group.

Stressing the reward benefits didn’t affect initial response rates, but did bump enrollment rates, the researchers found. They concluded that emphasizing the reward benefits helped boost program participation — but that the yes/no format itself had a much more powerful effect than the rewards did. The findings suggest that a yes/no format would be a powerful tool for marketers, employers, and anyone trying to get people to click a link.

It’s a deceptively simple technique, but it works, the researchers concluded. To get to “yes,” you just have to offer people the chance to say “no.”

Putnam-Farr, E., Riis, J. “‘Yes/No/Not Right Now’: Yes/No Response Formats Can Increase Response Rates Even in Non-Forced-Choice Settings.” Journal of Marketing Research 53.3 (2016): 424-432.

An episode of Burning Questions (Houston Chronicle podcast) featuring Anastasiya Zavyalova

The revelations seem endless. Decades after the Boston Globe exposed the breadth of Catholic priests' sex crimes against children, the Church is still embroiled in regular news of coverups, abuse and hidden lists of perpetrators. Rice Business professor Anastasiya Zavyalova, an expert in organizational crisis and reputation management, has been studying the Church's pedophile priest epidemic for years. In a podcast with the Houston Chronicle editorial board, Zavyalova discusses why this criminal pattern persists and how it affects victims, the faithful and individual parishes.

Anastasiya Zavyalova is an associate professor of strategic management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. 

By Claudia Kolker

Tucked amid the townhouses of Upper Kirby, the small brick building draws little attention. Its lawn is neat, its stairs are swept, its tenants rarely leave. Occasionally, hissing erupts inside. But that's to be expected. All the residents are cats.  

The home with the four-legged occupants and chic zip code belongs to Save A Purrfect Cat Rescue, a pet adoption nonprofit. Perhaps unique in the country, SAPCR’s spaces are based on the notion that cats are happiest in human environments. Nearly every detail, from the daybeds to the paintings on the walls, might fit inside a tasteful human home.

It’s an unusual bit of real estate by any measure. The owner, former Houstonian Patti Thomas, lives in Ghana. A clutch of volunteers manage the charity in Houston, operating a showroom where they present foster cats to would-be adopters. At other times, a select few volunteers tend the nearby house of cats: a furnished home occupied solely by animals. Snubbed by adopters for their quirks or ailments, these dozen or so cats will likely never find homes.  

Which is why Patti Thomas gave them hers.

***

What kind of human, with real estate worth more than $600,000, gives it up to cats? If you’re not a cat lover, it's tempting to come up with a profile: Someone unsuccessful at regular friendship or love; someone blind to all the humans who are hungry and homeless. That profile would be wrong.

Raised in Illinois farm country, Patti Thomas, now in her 70s, is tall and talkative, with the air of a pioneer woman able to vanquish any obstacle on the trail. In a sense, she has.

As a student at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, she met Len, her future husband, and followed him to the Peace Corps in Ghana. After heading to New York and New Orleans to complete their studies, they returned to Ghana, where Len worked in a hospital and Patti did doctoral research in parasitology. There, they adopted their first pet, a fierce street kitten who caught flies between its paws. Finally returning to New Orleans, the couple happily raised two children and continued their nonprofit work.

Then in 2005, just before Hurricane Katrina descended, Len was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. Fleeing to Houston, the family found shelter with Cambodian refugees whom they had sponsored years before.  When Len died, Patti’s daughter, then earning a statistics Ph.D. at Rice, persuaded her bereft mother to buy a small vintage building near the university. Patti soon was smitten with the new home. “I will never give this place to developers,” she said.

***

Soon Patti discovered another neighborhood attraction: a wildly energetic woman named Brenda Fraley. A ringer for actress Julianne Moore, Brenda was a former Los Angeles marketing executive who rescued greyhounds. In the late 1990s, after being diagnosed with breast cancer, Brenda moved with her husband to Houston for successful treatment. After noticing the feral cats who seemed to overrun her neighborhood, Brenda began trapping, neutering and hauling them to adoption shows. Her new friend Patti tagged along.

But cats, to be relaxed and most adoptable, need comfort, not the confines of a pet store. A humane adoption center, Brenda thought, should look like a house. In 2010, she rented her own space to show cats. With paint, soft sofas and endless mopping, it looked — and smelled — like a human home.

Patti, meanwhile, had returned to Ghana and community work. But she still owned her old home, plus a nearby rental property. Finances secure, she offered Brenda her now-empty former home as a way station for hard-to-place cats. When it was clear no adopters were pending for many of them, Patti made a decision. She gave her home to the cats.

To ward off animal dumpers, the friends kept the address confidential. Then, in 2015, Patti went further: She gave SAPCR her rental property as a permanent showroom, with Brenda as manager.

“Best thing I’ve ever done,” Patti says. “Somebody might say if I'm going to donate a house, why not to Habitat for Humanity or something? But destitute or homeless humans have more agency to solve their own problems than cats do.”

Inside Patti’s old home, clean floorboards gleam in the sun. A TV screens “Hogan's Heroes.” And dozens of bookshelves bear snoozing cats.

“Cats are 3D,” one volunteer explains. “Dogs and cats both like to move horizontally, but cats also elevate.”

He points to a giant artificial tree trunk, where an orange tabby sleeps on one bough. “This is Newman,” the volunteer says. “And this,” he adds, motioning toward a sleek Bengal cat whose paw touches Newman’s back, “is Princess. She’s in love."

***

In a perfect world, neutering, vaccinating and returning feral cats to the streets would empty most shelters. But in Texas, more unwanted animals are killed than in any other state.  

In light of this trend, the gentle spaces that Patti and Brenda offer abandoned cats are groundbreaking, says Holly Sizemore, the program director for Best Friends Utah, the nation’s biggest no-kill shelter. While other shelters offer communal cat rooms and café/shelter partnerships, Sizemore says, SAPCR’s spaces may be the only ones where cats and humans both feel at home.

Like the house of cats, the adoption center looks nothing like a shelter. Instead of institutional paint and easy-wash floors, it’s color-coordinated in a ’50s-style teal and brown, with matching carpet. A leather couch faces a fireplace; a basket of cat magazines stands nearby. In the kitchen, a turquoise coffee machine shares counter space with an immense, crouching tuxedo cat named Millie. Out in the living room, preposterous portraits depict cats in Elizabethan garb. The air is fresh and redolent of lavender.

Patti’s investment in these spaces strikes a chord for Rice Business professor Duane Windsor, who studies heroism. “This is a person the literature would identify as a ‘moral leader,’” he says. “By providing a home for less-adoptable cats, she’s championing animals. By creating an innovative marketplace to connect adopters with cats, she’s helping people and animals. Because humans are better off with a pet.”

***

It's late afternoon in Patti’s old house. Pumpkin, a gorgeous marmalade tabby, lolls by the window. She likes to roll in apparent ecstasy when a certain volunteer approaches, and then when he tries to pet her, bite him. The cat can’t help it.

Under a cocoa-colored blanket on the sofa, a bump slides slowly, finally emerging as a tuxedo cat who darts toward the couch legs. It’s Bailey, nearly always hiding.

Near the roof of the cat tree, Princess, who shrinks from people, taps Newman on the shoulder. He ignores her; he prefers humans. But due to his occasional habit of peeing on pantlegs, Newman, too, may find his love unrequited.

None of these cats, it is plain, qualifies as a perfect human companion. Then again, not many humans qualify either. In Patti’s house, however, perfection is not required. The residents are welcome to savor the sunlight, smooth floors and “Hogan's Heroes,” just as they are. With help from a human well acquainted with loss, displacement and love, here it’s enough to just be a cat.

Claudia Kolker is the associate director of intellectual capital at Rice Business School and author of “The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn From Newcomers To America About Health, Happiness, and Hope."

The world’s richest and largest startup business competition is now open for applications from students around the globe.

Graduate students with startup ventures are encouraged to apply for the 19th annual  Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) April 4-6 at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. Winners will be rewarded with prizes expected to exceed $1.5 million.

The deadline for applications is 5 p.m. CST Feb. 10. Students will need to answer a short questionnaire, submit an executive summary and an optional one-minute video pitch through the competition’s website, http://rbpc.rice.edu.

The annual competition, which attracts students from the world’s top universities, is expected to draw more than 500 teams in 2019. All applications will be reviewed by a committee comprising select members of the entrepreneurship and investment community. The field of finalists will be narrowed to 42 teams, and a cohort of 275 judges will decide which company represents the best investment opportunity.

New for this year: The RBPC has a custom-designed application, judging and scoring system. Developed and managed by Poetic, a Houston-based business technology solutions firm, the new platform will allow the RBPC to be more flexible and innovative than ever before.

The winner of the grand prize will ring the closing bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York.

More than 200 former competitors have successfully launched their ventures and are still in business today, including 25 startups that have been acquired. Past competitors have raised over $1.9 billion in capital and created more than 3,000 new jobs.

“The true measure of success for the Rice Business Plan Competition is the number of teams that launch, raise funding and go on to succeed in their business,” said Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Rice University, which hosts the event. “The competition has served as the launch pad for a great number of successful entrepreneurial ventures, and the success rate far exceeds the national average.”

The startup teams will compete in four categories: life sciences/medical devices/digital health; digital/information technology/mobile; energy/clean technology/sustainability; and other innovations. investment opportunity.

Top prizes in 2019 are expected to be similar to last year, including the $300,000 Investment Grand Prize from The GOOSE Society of Texas; the OWL Investment Prizes, which totaled $300,000 in 2018; the $125,000 Houston Angel Network (HAN) Investment Prize; and the $50,000 NASA Space Exploration Innovation Awards.

Cisco is again offering the largest cash prize at the competition. The $100,000 Cisco Global Problem Solver prize aims to recognize entrepreneurs who promote and accelerate the adoption of breakthrough technologies, products and services that capture the value of technological innovation to society. Special consideration will be given to businesses that also benefit the environment.

The second-place investment prize has increased to $125,000 in 2019. Finger Interests, Anderson Family Fund and Greg Novak of Novak Druce have contributed to the prize.

A new prize this year is the $50,000 Pediatric Device Prize. The RBPC is partnering with the Southwest National Pediatric Device Consortium at Texas Children’s Hospital/Baylor College of Medicine to offer this award to support the advancement and commercialization of novel pediatric medical devices. Eligible devices must be FDA-regulated with a pediatric indication (0-21 years of age).

Station Houston offered a $50,000 investment prize and two Engine of Innovation prizes offering last year’s top winners an opportunity to join Station Houston.

A goal of the RBPC competition is to encourage more women to create venture-fundable, technology-based startups, and nCourage Entrepreneurs Investment Group, a group of successful women angel investors, will provide an investment prize to the top startup with female founders. Last year, the group offered two prizes that totaled $100,000.

Sandi Heysinger and Dick Williams have supported a Women’s Health and Wellness prize since 2015, and in 2018 they awarded $65,000 in prizes for a plan or plans that best further the cause of specialized diagnosis, treatments or other innovations that let women lead longer, healthier and more satisfying lives.

The Texas Medical Center Accelerator, TMCx, offered two investment prizes totaling $50,000, plus a guaranteed spot in their accelerator, while the Texas Business Hall of Fame provided a $25,000 cash prize to the top finishing team from Texas. Pearland Economic Development Corporation offered a $20,000 cash prize.

For more information on the 2019 Rice Business Plan Competition and application information, visit http://rbpc.rice.edu.

By Jennifer (Jennie) Latson

If you really want to demonstrate your dislike for someone, end a sentence with a period.

“Thanks so much.” “That’s great.” “Happy birthday.” As a line in an email, a text, or a Facebook comment, any of these will effectively convey your contempt and devastate the recipient. By now, we all know that if you actually mean it, you’ll use an exclamation point — or several.

In one recent study, undergraduates at Binghamton University-State University of New York reported that text messages ending in a period struck them as abrupt and insincere. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “It’s especially bad in the workplace, where an exclamation point can suggest anything from actual excitement or gratitude, to general friendliness, to reassurance that 2 p.m. works for a meeting, to… ‘I’m not mad about the other day. I swear, it’s fine!’ ”

How did the exclamation point come to dominate our correspondence? It started with a cultural shift in the way we communicate, linguists say. As written communication — via email, text, instant messaging and social media — came to replace many of our in-person conversations, we lost a vital element of expression. Words, after all, are only part of communication: tone is equally crucial, and notoriously difficult to convey in writing. In person, you can say “thank you” sarcastically with a sneer, or genuinely with a smile. In writing, your options are more limited. That’s where the exclamation point comes in.

“The single exclamation mark is being used not as an intensity marker, but as a sincerity marker,” linguist Gretchen McCulloch told The Atlantic’s Julie Beck. “If I end an email with ‘Thanks!,’ I’m not shouting or being particularly enthusiastic; I’m just trying to convey that I’m sincerely thankful, and I’m saying it with a bit of a social smile.”

In fact, one exclamation point is barely enough, even in the buttoned-up world of business communication. “Digital communication is undergoing exclamation-point inflation,” Beck said. “When single exclamation points adorn every sentence in a business email, it takes two to convey true enthusiasm. Or three. Or four. Or more.”

Where does it end? The problem with runaway inflation — exclamatory or otherwise — is that it doesn’t, says James Weston, a finance professor at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

In a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek email, he writes: “Inflation in any form is dangerous! Once inflation starts, it gets very hard to stop!! Each time inflation rises, it makes the past inflation look tame!!!! It always feels like a good decision in the moment!!!!!!!! But the long-run societal consequences of inflationary policy are devastating!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hyperinflation is, more often than not, a precursor to war!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Not everyone is worried. Geoff Nunberg — a linguist at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and the author of “Ascent of the A-Word,” along with several other books about language — doubts that exclamation point inflation will bring on World War III.

“I’ll be alarmed if I see multiple exclamation points starting to bristle in the pages of the New Yorker or the New York Times,” he says, “but I find it hard to get indignant when they pop up in texts, tweets or informal email exchanges, which are really just the written versions of communications that used to take place orally.”

Still, the English majors among us cling to the doctrine that an exclamation point should be reserved for extreme circumstances (for example: “Shark!”). Multiple exclamation points, we insist, are grammatical overkill, permissible only in the rarest of cases (“Oedipus, she’s your mother!!!”). But since our arguments typically end in periods, they haven’t garnered much attention. 

Exclamation points are, after all, the Swiss Army knife of punctuation marks. They can be used to express a variety of emotions: excitement, glee, disbelief, outrage or anger. The writer doesn’t even have to commit to a usage; it’s up to the reader to interpret as she sees fit.

“Exclamation points are emphatic, but offer no inclination, affect, or meaning other than the superlative. They are loud but neutral,” explains Judith Roof, the William Shakespeare Professor of English at Rice.

That makes them a popular choice for the linguistically lazy. “Ultimately and sadly, I think the use of the exclamation point is also linked to the last 15 years’ gradual loss of vocabulary, expressive capacity, and overall linguistic mastery,” Roof says.

Constance Elise Porter, a marketing professor at Rice Business, agrees that the exclamation point epidemic is partly an indicator of our deteriorating writing skills. Although we may communicate in writing more than ever before, the kind of writing we’re doing is brisker, briefer, and less thoughtful, she argues. When we exchange texts and tweets, short emails and quick Facebook updates, we’re sacrificing both style and substance for another priority: speed.

“In this world of fast and acceptably incomplete written communication, the exclamation point seems to be the communicator's way of capturing everything that just takes too long to actually articulate in the most exciting way,” she says.

It’s also a mark of our desire to seem interesting — to rise above the noise on social media, Porter says.  Except, of course, that now everyone’s using them, so no one stands out. And that means that true exclamations — of the “Shark!” variety — may be obscured.

“Unfortunately, I think that what will happen is that we will begin to ignore the true meaning of the exclamation point — like the boy who cried wolf — and a truly meaningful, alarming, scary or otherwise escalated-emotion-laden event will have difficulty breaking through the clutter,” Porter cautions.

But English majors needn’t worry. “If this happens, then the greatest communicators will find a way for their voices to be heard,” she says. “The lazy communicators will remain lost in the sea of exclamation points.”

Jennifer Latson is a staff writer and editor at Rice Business and the author of The Boy Who Loved Too Much.

Based on research by Vikas Mittal, Karen Page Winterich (Penn State) and Andrea C. Morales (Arizona State)

Key findings:

• Emotions affect the way we understand ethical situations.
• To parse how the way we feel affects the way we think, Vikas Mittal and colleagues studied more than 700 participants, inducing states of mind easily found in any workplace.
• Employees who feel sad are more likely to carefully analyze extreme, unethical behavior than those who feel happy or disgusted.

Somebody left crumpled paper towels in the office restroom. A cat meme made you laugh out loud. Your coworker recently lost his elderly parent. Nearly every day of our working lives, we face situations that unleash a range of emotions. 

Do these emotions affect our understanding of ethics? In a recent study, Rice Business professor Vikas Mittal joined Karen Page Winterich of Pennsylvania State University and Andrea C. Morales of Arizona State University to see if sadness, disgust or happiness impact the way we understand and react to ethics-based decisions. 

The answer: yes, absolutely.

To parse how people respond to unethical behavior when they are sad, happy or disgusted, the researchers launched three separate studies involving more than 700 participants. They induced states of mind easily found in any workplace. Images of a dirty restroom triggered disgust; news of a positive work evaluation sparked joy. 

When workers felt disgusted or happy, the researchers discovered, their brains engaged in heuristic processing – that is, using mental shortcuts to process information. When they felt sad, however, their minds churned in more complex ways: Their judgments about unethical behavior were slower and more deliberative than when they were either happy or disgusted. The processing was similarly slow when they were in a neutral state of mind. 

Neither type of mental processing is inherently good or bad. But it does affect how workers see ethical decisions. Compared to those whose state of mind is sad or merely neutral, happy or disgusted people tend to see minor moral infractions as less important. Different emotional states, in other words, affect our judgment of an ethical infraction’s magnitude. 

To draw causal conclusions about the magnitude of these judgments, the researchers induced sadness, disgust or happiness in participants by asking them to write an autobiographical passage recalling a time when they felt one of those emotions. This primed the subjects with that specific emotional state, after which the researchers presented them with a variety of different unethical behaviors. 

Some of the hypothetical infractions were financial. In one experiment, for example, the subjects read scenarios describing behaviors such as tax fraud, insurance fraud and outright theft. And some of the scenarios were nonfinancial, but horrifying: For example, subjects were told to imagine situations involving cannibalism.

When a subject feels disgust, the researchers reasoned, it triggers a distancing reaction, leading her to withdraw both physically and psychologically. After all, people seem to naturally pull back from any disgusting situation. Because of this distancing effect, the subjects brains processed the unethical scenarios heuristically, using mental shortcuts. 

Interestingly, subjects who felt cheerful showed a response similar to that of people who were repulsed. That’s because happy people rely more on mental shortcuts and don’t bother systematically processing their judgments. Just like disgusted people, they tend to heuristically process whatever tasks they engage in, Mittal and his colleagues write. 

These shortcuts essentially meant that the subjects who felt disgust or happiness relied almost entirely on the gravity of an infraction itself to make moral judgments on unethical behaviors. 

The workplace implications are significant. Employees or managers who feel sad, Mittal writes, are more likely to pull their weight and carefully analyze unethical behavior, however extreme or minor. Conversely, workers who are either disgusted or happy rely more on simply the magnitude of the ethical infraction when making judgments. 

Most employees aren’t interested in embezzling a million dollars from the company coffers. But they might be tempted to fudge an expense report or pocket office supplies after hours. 

So if a coworker seems fixated on the icky washroom floor, or has simply fallen deliriously in love, it may worth a gentle reminder that if they see something unethical happening, they should say something. Even if it requires a second look.

Winterich, K. P., Morales, A. C., & Mittal, V. (2015). Disgusted or happy, it is not so bad: Emotional mini-max in unethical judgments. Journal of Business Ethics, 130.2: 343-360. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2228-2.