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Can ambient persuasive technology persuade unconsciously?: using subliminal feedback to influence energy consumption ratings of household appliances

Published: 26 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we explore a fundamental characteristic of Ambient Persuasive Technology: Can it persuade the user without receiving the user's conscious attention? In a task consisting of 90 trials, participants had to indicate which of three household appliances uses the lowest average amount of energy. After each choice, participants in the supraliminal feedback condition received feedback about the correctness of their choice through presentation of a smiling or a sad face for 150 ms. Participants in the subliminal feedback condition received identical feedback, but the faces were presented only for 25 ms, which prohibited conscious perception of these stimuli. The final third of the participants received no feedback. In the next task, participants rated the energy consumption of all presented appliances. Results indicated that supraliminal feedback and subliminal feedback both led to more correct energy consumption ratings as compared to receiving no feedback. Implications are discussed.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
Persuasive '09: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology
April 2009
279 pages
ISBN:9781605583761
DOI:10.1145/1541948
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 April 2009

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Author Tags

  1. ambient persuasive technology
  2. energy conservation behavior
  3. human-technology interaction
  4. persuasion
  5. social feedback
  6. subliminal feedback

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Persuasive 2009

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Persuasive '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 21 of 66 submissions, 32%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 32 of 137 submissions, 23%

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  • (2024)Psychologically Informed Design of Energy Recommender Systems: Are Nudges Still Effective in Tailored Choice Environments?A Human-Centered Perspective of Intelligent Personalized Environments and Systems10.1007/978-3-031-55109-3_9(221-259)Online publication date: 1-May-2024
  • (2022)Enhancing EFL Learners’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Learning English with Emoji Feedbacks in CALL: Why and HowBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1207022712:7(227)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2022
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