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Mining behavioral economics to design persuasive technology for healthy choices

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Influence through information and feedback has been one of the main approaches of persuasive technology. We propose another approach based on behavioral economics research on decision-making. This approach involves designing the presentation and timing of choices to encourage people to make self-beneficial decisions. We applied three behavioral economics persuasion techniques - the default option strategy, the planning strategy, and the asymmetric choice strategy - to promote healthy snacking in the workplace. We tested the strategies in three experimental case studies using a human snack deliverer, a robot, and a snack ordering website. The default and the planning strategies were effective, but they worked differently depending on whether the participants had healthy dietary lifestyles or not. We discuss designs for persuasive technologies that apply behavioral economics.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
        May 2011
        3530 pages
        ISBN:9781450302289
        DOI:10.1145/1978942
        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: 07 May 2011

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        Author Tags

        1. asymmetric dominance
        2. behavioral economics
        3. choice
        4. default bias
        5. health technology
        6. healthy eating
        7. persuasive technology
        8. present-biased preferences
        9. snacking

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        • (2024)BI-CST: Behavioral Science-based Creativity Support Tool for Overcoming Design Fixation.Companion Publication of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3656156.3663704(116-120)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
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