Opportunities for Argument-Centric Persuasion in Behaviour Change

The aim of behaviour change is to help people overcome specific behavioural problems in their everyday life (e.g. helping people to decrease their calorie intake). In current persuasion technology for behaviour change, the emphasis is on helping people to explore their issues (e.g. through questionnaires or game playing) or to remember to follow a behaviour change plan (e.g. diaries and email reminders). So explicit argumentation with consideration of arguments and counterarguments are not supported with existing persuasion technologies. With recent developments in computational models of argument, there is the opportunity for argument-centric persuasion in behaviour change. In this paper, key requirements for this will be presented, together with some discussion of how computational models of argumentation can be harnessed.