Exploring Susceptibility Measures to Persuasion

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that indicates how personalising persuasive strategies may increase the effectiveness of persuasive technologies and behaviour change interventions. This has led to a wide range of studies exploring susceptibility to persuasion which highlight the role of individual differences. Measuring susceptibility to persuasion, while accounting for individual differences can be challenging, particularly where persuasive strategies may be considered similar due to their underlying components. In this paper, we present a study exploring susceptibility to Cialdini's principles of persuasion with a focus on how we can distinguish susceptibility measures between the most recently identified Unity principle and Social proof. This study was conducted using an online survey incorporating susceptibility measures to all seven Cialdini principles and a measure of the actual effectiveness of seven corresponding persuasive strategies. Our results indicate that while we are able to distinguish susceptibility measures between Unity and Social proof, together with Commitment, Scarcity and Reciprocity, we were unable to obtain these with susceptibility measures for Liking and Authority.

Users’ Responsiveness to Persuasive Techniques in Recommender Systems

“…Oyibo et al’s findings support the results illustrated in Figure 3 since the majority of participants in this study are from individualist continents (as shown in Table 3 ). Also, a recent study by Vargheese et al (2020) confirms these findings. Vargheese et al stated that there is no actual relationship between the effectiveness of persuasive strategies and the ages of participants.…”

“…Besides, the authors found a significant difference between males and females in terms of Authority , where males found to be more persuadable. Vargheese et al (2020) also found that the effectiveness of the persuasive principles does not differ based on the gender of the participants.…”

Weakly-Supervised Hierarchical Models for Predicting Persuasive Strategies in Good-faith Textual Requests

“…Specifically, we leverage Petty and Cacioppo's elaboration likelihood model ( 1986) and Chiaken's social information processing model (Chaiken 1980), which suggest that people process information in two ways: either performing a relatively deep analysis of the quality of an argument or relying on some simple superficial cues to make decisions (Cialdini 2001). Guided by these psychology insights, we examine the aforementioned computational studies on persuasion and argumentation (Wang et al 2019;Yang et al 2019;Durmus, Cardie, and Durmus 2018;Vargheese, Collinson, and Masthoff 2020a;Carlile et al 2018), and further synthesize these theoretical and practical tactics into eight unified categories: Commitment, Emotion, Politeness, Reciprocity, Scarcity that allow people to use simple inferential rules to make decisions, and Credibility, Evidence, Impact that require people to evaluate the information based on its merits, logic, and importance. As shown in Table 1, our taxonomy distilled, extended, and unified existing persuasion strategies.…”