Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) an ethical, non-legislative, non-forcing approach to promoting responsible behaviours within organisations employs the central route of persuasion which consists of thoughtful considerations of arguments to achieve desired results. Studies suggest that attitudes that change through persuasion are more likely to persist temporally, resist counter persuasion ...

Social networking sites persuade millions of users each day to adopt specific behaviors. To understand this phenomenon in the context of persuasive technology, we analyzed how persuasion takes place in leading social networking sites from two different countries: Facebook in the U.S. and Mixi in Japan. We compared the two services on four persuasion goals: creating profile pages, inviting frien...

This critical review of B.J. Fogg’s book Persuasive Technology regards captology as an eclectic and formative work. It summarises two other reviewers’ work and identifies several new strengths. It scrutinises Fogg’s functional triad computers functioning as tools, media and social actors and some categorical changes are recommended. It investigates further Johnson’s concerns about specific ethi...

Can we use randomized field experiments to understand if and how persuasion efforts by campaigns work? To answer this question, we analyze a field experiment conducted during the 2008 presidential election in which 56,000 registered voters were assigned to persuasion in person, by phone, and/or by mail. We find persuasive appeals by canvassers had two unintended consequences. First, they reduce...

People generally assume that others are more influenced than the self (the third person perception or TPP). To further understand this perception we investigated people’s intuitive understanding of how persuasion works. Participants rated themselves or others on traits reflecting risk and immunity from persuasion (e.g., weakand strong-mindedness) and need for cognition (NFC). They then rated ho...

Although the field of persuasive technologies has lately attracted a lot of attention, only recently the notion of ambient persuasive technologies was introduced. Ambient persuasive technologies can be integrated into every aspect of life, and as such have greater persuasive power than the traditional box like machines. This article discusses ambient persuasion and poses a model that structures...

Predicting the effect of persuasion campaigns is difficult, as belief changes may cascade through a network. In recent years, political campaigns have adopted micro-targeting strategies that segment voters into fine-grained clusters for more specific targetting. At present, there is little evidence that explores the efficiency of this method. Through an Agent-Based Model, the current paper prov...

Research on threat appeals has yielded conflicting findings concerning the relative effectiveness of high threat versus low threat in persuasion. Studies reviewed here have investigated the effects on persuasion of variables in each of five areas: (a) the nature of the recommendations, (6) personality characteristics of the recipients, (c) source credibility, (d) learning of the message content...

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 r...

This paper presents the lessons learned in designing and evaluating a social persuasion system. This social persuasion system, called the Playful Bottle, consists of a mobile phone attached to an everyday drinking mug, and motivates office workers to drink healthy quantities of water. This study discusses the results of a 10-week quantitative user study and qualitative focus group interviews. W...