Persuasive Technology

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Contents

Readings

"The Persuasive Power of Human-Machine Dialog" Divya Ramachandran and John Canny, 3rd Int. Conf. on Persuasive Technology Persuasive08, 2008.

"Social Comparisons to Motivate Contributions to an Online Community" F. Maxwell Harper et al., 2nd Int. Conf. on Persuasive Technology Persuasive07, 2007.

"The Importance of Interface Agent Visual Presence: Voice Alone Is Less Effective in Impacting Young Women’s Attitudes Toward Engineering" Rinat B. Rosenberg-Kima et al., 2nd Int. Conf. on Persuasive Technology Persuasive07, 2007.

Supplementary Readings

Discussions

Please post your critiques/commments on the required readings below. To do that, first login by using your user name and password, then click the "edit" tab on the top part of this page (between the "discussion" page and the "history" page), New to wikis? Read the Wiki editing guide. . Hint - Please put a whole line == ~~~~ == (literally) at the beginning of your submitted critique, so the wiki system will index, sign and date your submission automatically.

Seth Horrigan 19:46, 21 April 2009 (PDT)

I was impressed with Divya's paper on the persuasion of dialogic interaction. It was a very well-designed pre-post experiment with a solid control and appropriate, clearly articulated statistical analysis. The hypotheses were clearly stated and the experiment tested the hypotheses well confirming them convincingly. I will definitely refer to this paper when discussing the merits of using dialogic systems for persuasion over recorded block messages. I would like to see more studies about where dialogic systems could be used effectively in other types of software.

Simon Tan 20:24, 21 April 2009 (PDT)

Concerning Divya Ramachandran's work:

I was actually there during some of the experiment runs for this study and I can say that the ID (Interactive Dialogue) system had a very clever setup. All of the possible responses to participant questions were laid out as buttons that the administrator could push on a whim. What the paper didn't mention was that the administrator could hear *everything* the participants were saying at all times, not just when the they pushed the Record button. So a lot of interesting side-commentary was recorded as the participants became frustrated, bored, or tired.

There was some concern as to whether the participants would become suspicious of the system (i.e. realizing that it was an intelligent human feeding them answers instead of an automated system) and I can see how that could affect the participant's decisions to listen to or ignore the advice of the system. I would have liked to see more data on how trusting the participants were of the system in general. I can also see a way for a participant to find out the truth - if they didn't press the Record button but the system was feeding them answers based on what the administrator was hearing!

The paper smartly recognizes the difficulty in transferring the results found in the study to other domains. The participants knew that this was make-believe and didn't really have incentive to do very well except for a slight monetary reward. In real-life situations, where health may very well be at risk, how easily persuaded could people be?

As a side note, I really liked the finding that serving up *less* information in a dialogue form was more effective than 'lecture-style' delivery. Perhaps it says something about effective transfer of knowledge in the real world as well.

KetrinaYim 23:18, 21 April 2009 (PDT)

What I found most interesting was the study concerning the use of animated anthropomorphic interface agents to change women's attitudes towards engineering. This was one of the uses of persuasive technology that I did not expect. As useful as it could be, though, I'm left wondering where this agent could be deployed. Perhaps on a website devoted to encouraging women to pursue engineering?

Also fascinating was the fact that having the animated agent was more effective than the voice alone. It's quite visibly apparent that the character speaking is not a real person, yet the character makes the recording more persuasive with its human-like appearance and human-like motions. I imagine an extension of the study could be to test effectiveness after changing certain aspects of the agent, such as using a nonhuman character, using a synthesized voice, or removing the deictic gestures.

Nicholas Kong 01:58, 22 April 2009 (PDT)

The Harper paper reminded me a little of some of Karrie Karahalios' work on visualizing conversations. For example, her Conversation Clock is a live visualization of a conversation, where each person is represented by a series of colored bars. In effect, it is a live representation of the history of the conversation. It gives a visual indicator of the extent to which different people participate. Interestingly, informal observations provided evidence that the visualization encouraged the interlocutors to balance their speaking time. This prompted some follow-on work in visual remote conversation, which examined (in more rigour) how live visualizations of voice conversations affected the participants. They found that the visualization particularly encouraged the reticent towards loquacity, and to some extent vice versa. The visualizations thus seemed to be persuading people to modify their behavior based on a preconceived notion of an "ideal" conversation, which appears to be one in which each person gets equal time.

David (Tavi) Nathanson 02:20, 22 April 2009 (PDT)

After reading Divya's study, I thought about the times that I've been effectively persuaded. One example that comes to mind is reviews of products on Amazon.com. When I am trying to figure out the best product to get, I am very rarely persuaded by a single review. I'm often persuaded by a *lot* of positive reviews, but that is usually not a possibility for many products (the more niche products). I am also persuaded if I see a positive review as well as a negative review (where the problem discussed in the negative review is one that doesn't matter to me), as I feel that I am getting a well-rounded sense of the product. I think that's very related to this study: i.e. the fact that dialogue seems to be more persuasive than a lecture, since dialogue feels more "well-rounded" in nature. With dialogue, people feel that they are getting *all* the information they need, because they know they asked everything relevant to them--just like with a combination of positive and negative reviews, people feel that all relevant bases have been covered.

Brian Tran 09:32, 22 April 2009 (PDT)

One thing I found of interest was how participants rated the voice to be more credible than fellow participants. Even though participants held the voice in higher regard, they still learned more from their fellow participants. I see this all the time in real life applications. Friends learn a lot from one another rather than their parents even when their parents are doctors and Ph. D's. Even in classes here at Cal, a lot of students don't learn that much from lecture taught by the professor and wait til section taught by another student to actually comprehend the material. I think a great deal of this is because people that are similar to you are easier to understand because they understand your preconceptions better.

Kenrick Kin 10:18, 22 April 2009 (PDT)

I agree with others that Divya's paper was quite clever. The 5 gallons of water was very low on the Confederate Ranking list. I wonder if their Interactive Dialogue system was able to actually bring that item down on the subjects ranking. I know little about surviving on the moon, but water being near the top of the list seems like a no-brainer. I think these types of Dialogue system could be useful in getting people to motivate people to do things. If my memory serves correctly, the Wii fit has a little agent who tries to motivate you to keep "working out." You can't really ask it questions, but depending on what you do, it'll ask you related questions or provide comments about the state of your progress. Even though the agent is a virtual character, it's conversational tone helps to point out and make you aware of how well you're doing and maybe make you feel guilty if you fall behind. To motivate someone further, it may help to connect Wii Fit to other users, so your status is known to other people. Having other people know how well you're doing, may motivate you to work harder.

Seth Horrigan 11:22, 22 April 2009 (PDT)

Since we are discussing persuasion and online reviews, the topics from the iSchool CMC class are directly relevant: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-12/f07/syllabus.php In particular the papers discussing reputation are applicable:

Nakashima, E. (2007) Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web: Law Students Feel Lasting Effects of Anonymous Attacks. In The Washington Post, 7 March 2007.

Yamagishi, T., Matsuda, M., Yoshikai, N., Takahashi, H., Y. Usui. (2004) Solving the Lemons Problem with Reputation: An Experimental Study of Online Trading.

Resnick, P., Zeckhauser, R., Swanson, J., and K. Lockwood. (2006) The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment. In Experimental Economics 9 (2).

Fiore, A.T., Lee Tiernan, S., and M.A. Smith. (2002) Observed Behavior and Perceived Value of Authors in Usenet Newsgroups: Bridging the Gap. In Proceedings of ACM Computer-Human Interaction.

Himanshu Sharma 11:56, 22 April 2009 (PDT)

I was impressed by the sound statistical model used in the Divya's paper. I think much of the success of Yahoo! Answers can be attributed to the "social comparison" - with different levels, point system, % of best answers, Leaderboards. It certainly persuaded me to answer a lot of questions. About the Rosenberg-Kima et-al paper, I think the change in attitude has been measured for a very short period and attitude towards choice of engineering fields is of a long term nature.

Kenrick Kin 16:42, 22 April 2009 (PDT)

I agree with others that Divya's paper was quite clever. The 5 gallons of water was very low on the Confederate Ranking list. I wonder if their Interactive Dialogue system was able to actually bring that item down on the subjects ranking. I know little about surviving on the moon, but water being near the top of the list seems like a no-brainer. I think these types of Dialogue system could be useful in getting people to motivate people to do useful things as we discussed on Monday. If my memory serves correctly, the Wii Fit has a little agent who tries to motivate you to keep "working out." You can't really ask it questions, but depending on what you do, it'll ask you related questions or provide comments about the state of your progress. Even though the agent is a virtual character, it's conversational tone helps to point out and make you aware of how well you're doing and maybe make you feel guilty if you fall behind. To motivate someone further, it may help to connect Wii Fit to other users, so your status is known to other people. Having other people know how well you're doing, may motivate you to work harder.

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