This paper explores the impact of political responses against terrorism and how they are linked to hypothetical voting intention. After September 11, 2001, terrorism became a major concern of democratic governments and their residents. Terrorism poses a constant unseen threat that people want to feel protected from. The goal of the current study was to examine whether the way political candidates communicate responses to terrorist actions affect the way people vote. The findings indicate that offensive portrayals of terrorism brought in more hypothetical votes than defensive ones. These data have the potential to help the general public better understand political messages related to the subject of terrorism along with facilitating communication during future possible crisis caused by terrorist attacks.

After law enforcement officials in Virginia found evidence of a dogfighting operation, the owner, National Football League star Michael Vick, became one of the most vilified figures in America for supporting a bloodsport that inflicts debilitating bodily harm on dogs. This thesis examines that case in light of the long human history of breeding fighting dogs for war and competitive entertainment. A content analysis was performed on a sample of news reports and opinion pieces that were published in three media outlets. Reactions to the Vick case illuminated strong popular opposition to dogfighting. Findings explore how strong anti-dogfighting views appeared in the publications while contrasting views were either criticized or ignored, and how the NFL sought to protect its tarnished image. Vick's notoriety opened the opportunity for animal rights organizations and activists opposing the bloodsport to argue for significant legal punishment.

This study examined patterns of framing in newspaper articles that mention gay teen suicide, gay bullying, and the "It Gets Better" campaign. A content analysis of randomly selected newspaper articles from 2009-2011 was performed. After presenting the frequency of content themes, emergent patterns are discussed. The most consistent theme--an evasive frame-- occurred with regard to homophobia, heterosexism, and meaningful solutions to anti-gay bullying. The day-to-day discrimination that LGBTQ people face was rarely addressed; instead, hot-button political topics such as same-sex marriage and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" were presented as signs of social progress. This research shows the importance of media framing, particularly the news media, in stories that report on gay bullying, suicide, and homophobia.

The speaking of John Taylor influenced the lives of Latter-day Saints for five decades. He delivered between two and three thousand addresses. In those addresses he promulgated a diversity of principles concerning the kingdom of God. This study focused on Taylor's ideas regarding liberty. Those ideas were often found in Taylor's speaking between 1857 and 1867. It was a time of threatened liberties for the people he lead. His speeches during those years played a significant part in swaying politcal and military efforts, as well as bolstering Mormon determination.This study found that Taylor's ideas of liberty are based largely on his religious fundament. To Taylor, religious and poilitcal philosophy were inseparably inter-related. He believed that the Latter-day Saints had special rights. He presented his ideas to Mormon and Gentile alike in pointed, frank sermons. Taylor spoke as he lived--with great intensity.

I dagens samhälle påverkar och påverkas vi ofta av sociala normer och konformitet. I arbetsplatskontexter har det blivit vanligt att individer konformerar sig till andra individer eller grupper. I organisationer och främst på arbetsplatser kan det ske att anställda försöker anpassa sig efter rådande förväntningar och normer för inte bli exkluderad från gruppen. Med tanke på hur mycket tid majoriteten av vuxna människor spenderar på sina arbetsplatser är det viktigt att studera arbetsmiljö och grupprelationer, inte minst idag då team och arbetsgrupper vuxit i popularitet. Men hur påverkar detta arbetskulturen och gemenskapen på en arbetsplats? Vad blir konsekvenserna av konformiteten? Med det i åtanke var syftet med denna studie att skapa djupare förståelse för maskinoperatörers upplevelse kring konsekvenser av konformitet på ett industriföretag i Sverige. Den valda metoden som användes i studien var kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer med tio maskinoperatörer. Resultatet visade på att grupperingarna som förekom på arbetsplatsen kunde ha negativ påverkan för maskinoperatörerna. Exempelvis kunde det bli svårt att skapa en samhörighet och en delad arbetskultur. Frånvarande ledarskap från lagledaren visade sig ha negativa effekter på inkludering, samhörighet och trygghet bland maskinoperatörerna. I studien framkom det att en distans mellan maskinoperatörerna och företagsledningen existerade samt att det fanns en maktasymmetri sinsemellan. / In today's society, we are often influenced by social norms and conformity. In work contexts it has become common for individuals to conform to other individuals or groups. In organizations and primarily in workplaces employees may try to adapt to prevailing expectations and norms to avoid being excluded from the group. Considering how much time most adults spend in their workplaces it is important to study the work environment and group relationships, especially today as teams and workgroups have grown in popularity. But how does this affect the workplace culture and cohesion among the employees? And what are the consequences of conformity? The purpose of this study was therefore to gain a deeper understanding of machine operators' experiences regarding the consequences of conformity in an industrial company in Sweden. The chosen method used in the study was qualitative semi structured interviews with ten machine operators. The results showed that the groupings that occurred in the workplace could have a negative impact on the machine operators. For example, it could be difficult to create a sense of belonging and a shared work culture. Absent leadership from the team leader was found to have negative effects on inclusion, sense of belonging, and wellbeing among the machine operators. The study revealed that a distance existed between the machine operators and the company's management and that there was a power asymmetry between them.

As an emerging group that wields its increasing influence through social media, social media influencers (SMIs) have continued to grow as a key component of firms’ digital marketing strategies. However, several aspects of SMIs merit attention: their personal characteristics, content features, and how they influence consumers’ decision-making as well as online engagement. By using the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model together with theories of social connection and social influence, this dissertation reveals the influence of SMIs on consumer behaviors in tourism and hospitality contexts by investigating travel SMIs’ influencing stimuli, mechanisms, and audience responses. Study 1 extracts topics from comments on posts created by two travel SMIs from different cultures; identifies these SMIs’ personal characteristics and content features; and uncovers how travel SMIs wield social connection, value-expressive influence, and informational influence from a cross-cultural perspective. Study 2 includes a pair of sub-studies that quantitatively examine travel SMIs’ marketing effectiveness and unveil associated mechanisms by focusing on social influence theory (i.e., value-expressive and informational influences). Topic modeling, netnographic analysis with social media data, and experimental designs are adopted to achieve all research objectives. Findings extend the understanding of travel SMIs’ influencing processes in consumers’ decision making/online engagement and provide practical implications for applying SMI marketing in tourism and hospitality. / Tourism and Sport

Humans procrastinate and avoid performing activities that they deem dull, repetitive, and out of their comfort zone. Gamification was conceived to reverse the situation by turning those activities into fun and entertaining actions exploiting game-like elements. In practice, however, many challenges arise. Gameful environments cannot satisfy every player's preference and motivational need with a one-fits-all strategy. However, meeting players' motivational affordances can provide intrinsic rewards rather than extrinsic (e.g., points and badges). Producing intrinsic rewards is desirable as they are more likely to foster long-term retention than the extrinsic counterpart. Therefore, gamified systems should be designed to learn and understand players' preferences and motivational drivers to generate specific adaptation strategies for each player. Those adaptation strategies govern the procedural generation of personalized game elements - examples are task difficulty, social-play versus solo-play, or aesthetic tools. However, an appropriate personalization requires intelligent and effective player profiling mechanisms. Player profiles can be retrieved through the analysis of telemetry data, and thus in-game behaviors. In this project, we studied players' individual and social behaviors to understand their personalities and identities within the game. Specifically, we analyzed data from an open-world, persuasive, gamified system: Play&Go. Play&Go implements game-like mechanics to instill more ecological transportation habits among its users. The gamified app offers various ways for players to interact with the game and among one another. Despite Play&Go being one of the few examples of gamification implementing more diverse game mechanics than solely points and leaderboards, it still does not reach the complexity of AAA entertainment games. Thus, it limits the applicability of an in-depth analysis of players' behaviors, constrained by the type of available features. Yet, we argue that gameful systems still provide enough information to allow content adaptation. In this work, we study players' in-game activity from different perspectives to explore gamification's potential. Towards this, we analyzed telemetry data to (1) learn from players' activity, (2) extract their profiles, and (3) understand social dynamics in force within the game. Our results show how players' experience in gamified systems is closer to games than expected, especially in social environments. Hence, telemetry data is a precious source of knowledge also in gamification and can help retain information on players' churn, preferences, and social influence. Finally, we propose a modular theoretical framework for adaptive gamification to generate personalized content designed to learn players' preferences iteratively.

Models of the need-driven information search and the information appraisal process were formed from a comprehensive literature review of factors affecting perceived credibility and trust in online information. The social component of online credibility has not, to date, been thoroughly researched. This component's impact on the development of the perceived credibility of online information was examined in two experiments. In the first experiment, the impact of positive, mixed, and negative social feedback on the development of the perceived credibility of a web page was evaluated. In the second experiment, the effect of social feedback on credibility was examined under two levels of motivation for information use to investigate whether social feedback becomes less important as motivation to obtain quality information increases. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that type of feedback can influence perceived web page credibility. Pages with negative audience feedback received the lowest credibility ratings, while pages with positive audience feedback received the highest credibility ratings. Pages with mixed or no audience feedback received higher credibility ratings than pages with negative feedback, but lower credibility ratings than pages with positive feedback. In Experiment 2, high motivation did not impact the number of web page elements participants reported that they used to determine credibility. High motivation for information use also did not reduce the impact of audience feedback on perceived credibility.

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