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Adaptive Persuasive Systems: A Study of Tailored Persuasive Text Messages to Reduce Snacking

Published: 01 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

This article describes the use of personalized short text messages (SMS) to reduce snacking. First, we describe the development and validation (N = 215) of a questionnaire to measure individual susceptibility to different social influence strategies. To evaluate the external validity of this Susceptibility to Persuasion Scale (STPS) we set up a two week text-messaging intervention that used text messages implementing social influence strategies as prompts to reduce snacking behavior. In this experiment (N = 73) we show that messages that are personalized (tailored) to the individual based on their scores on the STPS, lead to a higher decrease in snacking consumption than randomized messages or messages that are not tailored (contra-tailored) to the individual. We discuss the importance of this finding for the design of persuasive systems and detail how designers can use tailoring at the level of social influence strategies to increase the effects of their persuasive technologies.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
    ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems  Volume 2, Issue 2
    June 2012
    133 pages
    ISSN:2160-6455
    EISSN:2160-6463
    DOI:10.1145/2209310
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    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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    Publication History

    Published: 01 June 2012
    Accepted: 01 September 2011
    Revised: 01 September 2011
    Received: 01 February 2011
    Published in TIIS Volume 2, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Persuasion
    2. personalization
    3. persuasion profiling
    4. social influence
    5. tailoring

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