Inclusion and the Tiger Woods Factor
NOTE: This article on the false sense of inclusion inspired by the popularity of Tiger Woods was originally published in the Diversity Central online magazine, August 2001. Public sentiments about Tiger Woods have changed several times since then. “To succeed in this organization, you have to play golf.” “You have to be a tall, white […]
Tell me a story about getting vaccinated
To test the effects of different vaccination advocacy message strategies on attitudes toward HPV vaccination, we randomly assigned study participants (N = 963) to one of four different message-strategy groups: (1) The Narrative Strategy–A short story about a parent, Mark, who takes his 11-year-old daughter Emma to the doctor. During the visit, the doctor recommends […]
Marginal voters more likely to vote for Democrats in 2020
Surveys of people who said they will "probably not vote" suggest as many as seven times more Republican-leaning voters will sit out the election than Democrat-leaning voters. Continue reading
3 simple strategies to sway people who don’t want to listen
Are Democrats just bad at communication? Consider all the hand-wringing after the release of the Mueller Report. There were 448 pages of documented evidence of shady dealings by a presidential candidate and his minions before and after the 2016 election and the 2017 inauguration. Before and after its release, Democrats in Congress, on talk shows, […]
What happened to the middle?
We hear a lot about political polarization these days. Editorial pages and pundits and Uncle Fred on his Thanksgiving Day soapbox express quite a bit of wishing that our politicians would pay more attention to the reasonable, norms-loving moderates in the middle. But is there anybody there? In his book, The Partisan Sort: How Liberals […]
On encountering another smartest person in the room
Are you in the right room? One of the problems with being the smartest person in the room is you too often expect no one else in the room will have anything of value to add, and that <sigh> you will have to expend soooo much energy getting those people who keep speaking up to […]
Marketing Objective #1
Marketing 101: To the Navel and Beyond Whether you’re a for-profit business, a not-for-profit service provider, or a not-making-enough-profit individual, it’s a good idea to do a frequent review of your fundamental marketing objectives and your plans for achieving them. I’m a fundamentalist at heart. Except when it comes to religion, I think learning and […]
The Last Word on Improving Patient Satisfaction
You’ve improved your patient-care processes and outcomes but you’re still not happy with your patient satisfaction scores. And now, with CMS reimbursements increasingly tied to those scores, the pressure is rising to raise them. Fortunately, the fields of psychology and behavioral economics may offer some easy-to-implement solutions to improve patient satisfaction scores both coming and […]
Can you punctuate a quote?
How good are you at quotation punctuation? Everyone who writes news releases for a living knows the value of quotations. But surprisingly few people graduating from college today can actually punctuate sentences with quotations in them. Can you? Here are 10 punctuation challenges. A pro should be able to get all 10 correct. (1) im proud […]
Reducing Risky Behavior
Risk Communication Can Be Risky Environmental Safety and Public Health Policy-Makers Often Make Matters Worse Communication of science-based information to the general public…particularly health-related information…is a well-studied field. This may be because it is so often done so poorly. Many public behavior interventions, especially those based on intuition, “common sense,” political persuasion or religious belief, […]