Persuasive Technology 2009: Day 2

Does it Make a Difference Who Tells You What To Do?
Maaike Roubroeks, Cees Midden and Jaap Ham

• Psychological reactance: A state of arousal that occurs when a person experiences a perceived threat to freedom, which motivates to restore that threatened freedom
• When does it occur When you try to persuade people to do something, you always send them in some kind of direction: stop smoking, more exercise, energy conservation
• Social agency: Social agency theory (Mayer, Sobko & mautone, 2003) – Social cues trigger social rules and consequently social interaction, CASA Paradigm (Nass & Reeves, 2002) – – people react to computers as if they were reacting to other people
• Research Question: What is the role of social agency on psychological reactance?, Hypothesis 1: High threat > Low threat (confirmed by the research), Hypothesis 2: Higher social agency, more psychological reactance (confirmed by the research), Hypothesis3: combine 1 and 2 will result in strongest response (research result did not confirm this)
• Research: 89 participants, online experiment, read an advisory test, questionnaires afterwards, mreasure of reactance
• Conclusions: To minimize psychological reactance to occur, use low-threatening language

Subtle Persuasion: The Unobtrusive Effect of Website-Banner Congruence on Trust
Peter de Vries and Thomas van Rompay

• Trust reduces uncertainty. Important if consumers need to be persuaded… to divulge personal information, to make a purchase, to become loyal, to rely on provided advice/information
• Trust is particularly important in online and, by extension, mobile interactions. How to influence online trust? e.g. seals of approval, privacy disclosures, security disclosures, return policy, awards from neutral sources.
• Effects of on-line atmospherics on cognition and behavior: Website color, website layout, background images. Effects of congruence on attitudes: More positive attitude when banner and web site are congruent
• Processing fluency (PF): the ease with which different stimuli can be integrated. Similar to Ease of Retrieval, PF is hedonically marketed: Experienced ease of processing positively influences subsequent evaluations
• PF influenced by: symmatry, goodness of form, contract in color of text and background, congruence between associations with stimuli. The ease with which different elements of a websie and associations with them can be integrated influences subsequent opinions.
• Experiment: Mobile website with either a congruent, mildly incongruent and incongruent banner ad.
• Results: The more congruent the more trust
• Trust is influenced by congruence, and this relation is mediated by processing fluency. Although significant, mediation was only partial; automatic AND cognitively controlled effects of congruence?

Communication-Based Influence Components Model
Brian Cugelman, Mike Thelwall and Phil Dawes

• Real-world online interventions: Quit smoking, exercise more, drive safer, drink less, eat healthier. Designing online interventions: 1. Research behaviour and audiences, 2. Pick a suitable theory, 3. Pick techniques to influence users’ psychology, 4. build a mock-up etc. The result of this model is complex real-world interventions. Result in difficult applying systems to describe online interventions: too many theories to choose from, with numerous overlapping theories.
• Behavioural influence frameworks: 1. Evidence-based behavioural medicine (what works) 2. Cialdini, 3. Captology, 4. Stages of change, 5. Community based social marketing. Influence components approaches: Evidence-based kernels, behavioural change consortium, Evidence-based behavioral medicine. Influence Components Model: Behavioral Outcome, Behavioral Determinants, Influencers.
• Applying communication theory online: one-way: one-to-one, one-to-many; two-way: circular, interpersonal and mass media; mass interpersonal (two-way one-with-many)
• Communication theory to frame online influence
• Apply the model: Using in a meta-analysis of online behavioural change interventions (being finalized)
• Closing: The model worked well for the meta-analysis

Three Possible Futures for Persuasive Technology
BJ Fogg

• Goal: make the world a better place.
• Tradition: change attitude, deep thinking, theory guides steps, control intervention, measure result

Million Monkeys: If you got enough monkeys, you can create great literatures — automated or random, create many trials. An example of this is spam. Another example is YouTube (www.youtube.com/users/Fred). 3rd example is Facebook’s opening their platform. 4th example, hunch “helps you make decisions and get smarter the more you use it.” Hunch is a decision engine. The contents are created by its users.

• Savvy DJ: use metrics drive iteration with many trials. With feedback loop, DJs iterates with changes that adopt to the market. Pattern matching. Company that are doing this: zynga (game network), slide, and RockYou (watch metrics constantly)

Swisher: analyze what exists and do pattern matching. output on a schedule. http://kara.allthingsd.com She has very engaging point of view.

• These are possible things that are happening and may pose challenges. BJ wanted to identify these ideas and share with the community and increase awareness.

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