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Personalizing Persuasive Technologies: Do Gender and Age Affect Susceptibility to Persuasive Strategies?

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Rita Orji at Dalhousie University
Rita Orji
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Abstract

Personalizing Persuasive Technologies (PTs) increase their effectiveness at motivating desired behavioral change. However, most existing efforts towards personalizing PTs and developing personalization models were focused on people from the western countries. In this work, we focused on African audience to investigate how individual’s responsiveness to three persuasive strategies (Reward, Social Learning, and Social Comparison) varies by Gender and Age group via a large-scale study of 712 participants. The results of a RM-ANOVA show significant differences in responsiveness to the strategies across the gender and age groups. Females are more responsive to the Reward and Social Learning strategies while males are more responsive to the social comparison strategy. People who are under 25 years are more likely to be persuaded by the Reward and social Learning than participants above 35 years who are more responsive to the Social Comparison strategy. The results will inform PT designers on the appropriate strategy to employ to personalize PTs to individual users based on their Age and Gender.
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... However, most persuasive systems or interventions are designed in a "one-size-fits-all" or non-tailored manner [17,107], and this approach may be ineffective since different people are motivated by different persuasive strategies [99,104,108,111]. In addition, different users and user groups may not be motivated by the same persuasive strategy [21,75,106,107,116]. ...
... As a result, there is growing interest in tailoring persuasive systems, including those targeted at health behaviours, based on user's characteristics [106,148]. Research reveals that tailoring persuasive interventions can increase their effectiveness in achieving desired behaviour compared to systems that are not tailored [103], and have shown that user characteristics such as personality type [71,111], gamer type [84,110], gamification user type [107], age and gender [108,117], are useful dimensions for tailoring persuasive and behaviour change systems. However, research in this area are generally in their infancy and little is known about how persuasive systems or interventions can be tailored to individuals in various stages of behaviour change. ...
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  • May 2021
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... Over the years, various personalisation efforts and dimensions including personality types (Anagnostopoulou et al. 2017; Orji, Nacke, and Di Marco 2017), user types (Altmeyer et al. 2021; Anagnostopoulou et al. 2017; Orji et al. 2013), demographics (e.g. age, gender, culture, etc.)(Khaled et al. 2008;Orji, Abdullahi, and Oyibo 2018;Oyibo and Vassileva 2020), and stages of change(Altmeyer et al. 2021; ...
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  • Aug 2022
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Persuasive systems motivate behaviour change using persuasive strategies (PS) which are often implemented in various ways. However, whether or not the effectiveness of PS varies depending on implementation choices is yet to be investigated via an empirical study. We conduct a large-scale study of 568 participants to investigate if and how individuals at different Stages of Change (SoC) respond to different implementations of each strategy in the same system. We also explore why the implementations motivate behaviour change using ARCS motivation model. Our results show that people's SoC plays a significant role in the perceived effectiveness of different implementations of the same strategy and that the implementations motivate for different reasons. For instance, people at the precontemplation stage are motivated by reward strategy implemented as badges because it increases their Confidence, while people in the preparation stage prefer reward implemented as points to build their Confidence. Our work links SoC theory with motivation theory and Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) model to offer practical guidelines for tailoring PS implementations to individuals to motivate behaviour change.
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Article
Full-text available
  • Sep 2022
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Conference Paper
Full-text available
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Article
Full-text available
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  • ACM T COMPUT-HUM INT
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Conference Paper
Full-text available
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Conference Paper
Full-text available
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Conference Paper
Full-text available
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  • Lect Notes Comput Sci
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Article
Full-text available
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Conference Paper
Full-text available
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Article
Full-text available
  • Mar 2009
A growing number of information technology systems and services are being developed to change users’ attitudes or behavior or both. Despite the fact that attitudinal theories from social psychology have been quite extensively applied to the study of user intentions and behavior, these theories have been developed for predicting user acceptance of the information technology rather than for providing systematic analysis and design methods for developing persuasive software solutions. This article is conceptual and theory-creating by its nature, suggesting a framework for Persuasive Systems Design (PSD). It discusses the process of designing and evaluating persuasive systems and describes what kind of content and software functionality may be found in the final product. It also highlights seven underlying postulates behind persuasive systems and ways to analyze the persuasion context (the intent, the event, and the strategy). The article further lists 28 design principles for persuasive system content and functionality, describing example software requirements and implementations. Some of the design principles are novel. Moreover, a new categorization of these principles is proposed, consisting of the primary task, dialogue, system credibility, and social support categories.
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Conference Paper
  • Apr 2013
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