Exploring the Persuasiveness of Behavior Change Support Strategies and Possible Gender Differences

There is need to investigate the persuasiveness of various health behavior promoting strategies that are commonly employed in behavior change interventions design with respect to possible gender effect. Behavior change researchers have advocated the need to adapt persuasive approaches to various user characteristics. Gender has been identified to influence behavior in many domains. Therefore, this paper presents a comparative study investigating the perceived persuasiveness of health behavior promotion applications depicting ten commonly employed behavior change strategies. The population of interest are males and females and the purpose of the study is to investigate differences in persuadability and the perceived persuasiveness of behavior change strategies overall. To achieve this, we conducted a largescale study on 1108 participants (575 males and 533 females) to examine the persuasiveness of ten strategies that are commonly employed in health behavior change intervention design. We also examined possible gender effects on the persuasiveness of various strategies. The results of the analysis show that some of the strategies studied are highly persuasive overall, while others were rated low in persuasiveness. The results also suggest that males and females differ significantly in persuadability – with females being more receptive to most of the behavior change strategies. Some strategies are more suitable for persuading one gender than the other. We therefore conclude that gender-dependent approaches would generally be more appropriate for designing behavior change support systems that will effectively promote health behavior change than the one-size-fits all approach.