Recent research has demonstrated that when people resist persuasive attacks, they can under specifiable conditions become more certain of their initial attitudes. The present research explores the role of elaboration in determining when this effect will occur. Using both self-reported differences in situational elaboration (Study 1) and chronic individual differences in the need for cognition (...

The aim of behaviour change is to help people to change aspects of their behaviour for the better (e.g., to decrease calorie intake, to drink in moderation, to take more exercise, to complete a course of antibiotics once started, etc.). In current persuasion technology for behaviour change, the emphasis is on helping people to explore their issues (e.g., through questionnaires or game playing) ...

Psychological and other persuasive mechanisms across diverse contexts are well researched, with many studies of the effectiveness of specific persuasive techniques on distinct types of human behaviour. In the present paper, our specific interest lies in the development of a generalized modular psychometric tool to measure individuals' susceptibility to persuasion. The scale is constructed using...

Emotional argumentation is the result of a rational form of reasoning by the Persuader, subsequently translated into messages by applying some variants of the ‘classical’ argumentation schemes. In this paper, we discuss which may be assumed to be the relative strength of emotional vs. rational persuasion strategies and how this has been represented in a dialogic persuasion testbed.

I introduce and study dynamic persuasion mechanisms. A principal privately observes the evolution of a stochastic process and sends messages over time to an agent. The agent takes actions in each period based on her beliefs about the state of the process and the principal wishes to influence the agent’s action. I characterize the optimal persuasion mechanism and apply it to some examples.

My broad concern is with texts which aim to persuade an audience of a particular point of view on a particular topic – persuasion texts. Political speeches and newspaper editorials are examples of this text type. I put forward a strategy for critically engaging with such texts. Its focus is a persuasion text’s cohesion – how it is held together through its vocabulary and grammar. The strategy e...

In many settings of economic interest, information is ex ante symmetric, but one agent designs the informational environment—i.e., controls what additional information will be generated. A number of recent papers study such situations, with applications including Internet advertising (Rayo and Segal 2010), communication in organizations (Jehiel 2013), bank regulation (Gick and Pausch 2012; Gold...

When is it possible for one person to persuade another to change her action? We take a mechanism design approach to this question. Taking preferences and initial beliefs as given, we introduce the notion of a persuasion mechanism: a game between Sender and Receiver defined by an information structure and a message technology. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a ...

the purpose of present research was comparing tendency to risky behaviours in secure/insecure attachment in parents (mother/father). the results showed that those showing insecure attachment patterns towards the mother were significantly higher at risk to become cigarette smokers, drug persuasion, and alcohol drinkers compared to those with secure attachment patterns. those showing insecure att...