The CAT Effect: Exploring the Impact of Casual Affective Triggers on Online Surveys' Response Rates

TL;DR

This study investigates how Casual Affective Triggers (CAT) in survey invitations influence response rates, finding that CATs increase participation without causing response bias, through a controlled experimental design.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of CATs in survey invitations and empirically demonstrates their positive effect on response rates without bias.

Findings

CATs increase survey response rates

No evidence of response bias from CATs

Personalized and visual triggers are effective

Abstract

We explore the impact of Casual Affective Triggers (CAT) on response rates of online surveys. As CAT, we refer to objects that can be included in survey participation invitations and trigger participants' affect. The hypothesis is that participants who receive CAT-enriched invitations are more likely to respond to a survey. We conducted a study where the control condition received invitations without affective triggers, and the experimental condition received CAT-enriched invitations. We differentiated the triggers within the experimental condition: one-third of the population received a personalized invitation, one-third received a picture of the surveyor's cat, and one-third received both. We followed up with a survey to validate our findings. Our results suggest that CATs have a positive impact on response rates. We did not find CATs to induce response bias.