Persuasive technologies are growing in popularity and many designers create systems which intentionally change users attitudes or behaviors. This study shows that peoples individual differences in susceptibility to persuasion, as implemented using the six persuasion principles proposed by Cialdini [2], relates to their compliance to a persuasive request which is accompanied by a persuasive cue....

Increased popularity of smartphones has great potential to assist individuals in making healthy changes to their behaviour. Obesity and sedentary lifestyles are fast becoming a healthcare concern in modern societies. This study takes an important step in designing persuasive fitness applications (or apps) that can enhance the physical activity behaviour of individuals. We conceptualize that per...

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 research hypothesized that auditory icons that represent eating can be used to induce mimicry in food intake behavior. Numerous studies show that, when two people are eating together, they mimic each other’s eating behavior. To test this hypothesis, participants were asked to eat diced apples. While eating, they can hear auditory icons that represent other people’s eating sound. In reality...

In this paper we throw further light on four questions on the argumentative use of emotive words studied in the recent literature on persuasive definitions. (1) What is the semantic and argumentative structure of an emotive word? (2) Why are emotive words so powerful when used as argumentative instruments? (3) Why and (4) under what conditions are persuasive definitions (based on emotive words)...

In the HCI domain, many researches have been carried out on how to apply Persuasive Technology (PT) to stimulate a more active lifestyle. Regarding collectivist cultures, social influence has been considered as one of the most impactful factors among others in PT. Within one societal context, however, different individuals may need different motivational mechanisms based on social persuasion. I...

The study presented in this paper is carried out to support debate performance assessment in the context of debate skills training. The perception of good performance as a debater is influenced by how believable and convincing the debater’s argumentation is. We identified a number of features that are useful for explaining perceived properties of persuasive speech and for defining rules and str...

The authors tested the hypothesis that after motive arousal, individuals with an inhibited power motive (IPM) would excel at a persuasive task and explored the behavioral strategies IPM individuals use to that purpose. Sixty-eight participants presented their point of view on a controversial subject to another person. Power motivation and inhibition were both assessed by a picture-story test. P...

Based on a discussion of current issues in teaching business Chinese, this article proposes an ethnographic approach for the teaching of business Chinese. Specifically, it highlights the imperative for the ethnographic approach and details the components of this approach. In the discussion, reference is made to the research findings in contrastive rhetoric, ethnographic research and genre analy...

Language use is a type of behavior not yet addressed by the academic persuasive technology community. Yet, many existing applications seek to change users’ word choices or writing style. This paper catalogues 32 such applications in common usage or reported in the popular media. We use Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values to understand what motivates each attempt to persuade; we use the Pers...