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Scholars and research teams focus their efforts on studying ways to improve the lives of individuals, which often brings tangible social benefits. However, there is scarce scientific knowledge available on negative outcomes of behavior change interventions, and possibly even fewer that report a special type of negative outcome, called a backfire. In this paper, we start a wider scientific discussion on intervention backfiring. We introduce a framework to help facilitate the debate of this topic. We provide tools to aid academics in the study of this realm and support practitioners to remain mindful of the potential risks when designing behavior change interventions. We describe taxonomy of persuasive backfiring and propose tools in the form of intention-outcome and likelihood-severity matrices to outline a roadmap for further research and application. We open transparent discussion on backfiring, with an attitude of looking out and coming up with strategies to reduce them whenever identified.

People continuously experience various types of engagement through social media, mobile interaction, location-based applications, and other technologically advanced environments. Often, integral parts of such socio-technical contexts often are information systems designed to change behaviors and attitudes of their users by leveraging powers of social influence, further defined as socially influencing systems (SIS). Drawing upon socio-psychological theories, this paper initially reviews and presents a typology of relevant social influence aspects. Following that, it analyzes four partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) based empirical studies to examine the interconnectedness of their social influence aspects. As a result, the analysis provides grounds for seminal steps towards the development and advancement of a framework for designing and evaluating socially influencing systems. The main findings can also deepen understanding of how to effectively harness social influence for enhanced user engagement in socio-technical environments and guide persuasive engineering of future socially influencing systems.

Can you imagine a city that feels, understands, and cares about your wellbeing? Future cities will reshape human behavior in countless ways. New strategies and models are required for future urban spaces to properly respond to human activity, environmental conditions, and market dynamics. Persuasive urban systems will play an important role in making cities more livable and resource-efficient by addressing current environmental challenges and enabling healthier routines. Persuasive cities research aims at improving wellbeing across societies through applications of socio-psychological theories and their integration with conceptually new urban designs. This research presents an ecosystem of future cities, describes three generic groups of people depending on their susceptibility to persuasive technology, explains the process of defining behavior change, and provides tools for social engineering of persuasive cities. Advancing this research is important as it scaffolds scientific knowledge on how to design persuasive cities and refines guidelines for practical applications in achieving their emergence.

Since its first proposition in 1984, the Kano model has been used extensively in a variety of contexts within industries and academic research demonstrating its wide applicability. The Kano model allows for describing the relationship between an objective aspect and a subjective aspect. Yet is this relevant for environmental quality as well? In this study, we explore the cases where the Kano model is used for assessing environmental quality and its perception by consumers and identify the potential influencing factors for its application with this respect. We find that the Kano model can serve as an effective tool for converging towards environmental quality and sustainability by indicating the direction from a social and behavioral choice perspective. We propose an integration of the Kano model with Bandura's triangle (a concept of the social cognitive theory) to create an instrument for driving change of customer attitude and behavior via changing the perception of environmental quality.