In a condensed moment quite typical of the overstated bombast appropriate to a philosopher who was in his heart very much a metaphysician, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that, “The creation of the world . . . is the victory of persuasion over force” (1933, 90). The metaphysics of Whitehead was a metaphysics of process, one variant of what I have called elsewhere a philosophy of transitions.1...

A theoretical framework for communication and persuasion technology is introduced, utilizing people’s emotions and personality characteristics. It uses two unobtrusive psychophysiological measures to penetrate people’s emotional space: heart rate variability and the variability of the fundamental frequency of the pitch of the voice. In addition, two experiments are described that validate these...

The research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has nowadays extended its attention to the study of persuasive technologies. Following this line of research, in this paper we focus on websites and mobile applications in the e-commerce domain. In particular, we take them as an evident example of persuasive technologies. Starting from the hypothesis that there is a strong connection between logi...

The Doctor and the Pastry Chef: Pleasure and Persuasion in Plato’s Gorgias Penultimate draft – final version in Ancient Philosophy, 27, 2007 Jessica Moss The Gorgias’ ostensible subject is rhetoric, which it defines as a “producer of persuasion.” But the dialogue is also centrally concerned with another kind of persuasion: Socrates’ attempts to persuade his interlocutors to pursue the life of j...

Managers often face a choice between authority and persuasion. In particular, since a firm’s formal and relational contracts and its culture and norms are quite rigid in the short term, a manager who needs to prevent an employee from undertaking the wrong action has the choice between either trying to persuade this employee or relying on interpersonal authority. Herbert Simon (1947) noted, for ...

The present research compared the relative effectiveness of an attribution strategy with a persuasion strategy in changing behavior. Study 1 attempted to teach fifth graders not to litter and to clean up after others. An attribution group was repeatedly told that they were neat and tidy people, a persuasion group was repeatedly told that they should be neat and tidy, and a control group receive...

The persuasion literature has examined several mechanisms that have contributed to understanding the effectiveness of credible, attractive, similar, and powerful sources. These traditionally studied processes focus on how persuasive sources can affect attitudes by serving as peripheral cues or by influencing the direction or the amount of thoughts generated. After describing these processes tha...