Persuasion in Health Awareness

By Simon | Published: March 9, 2010

The following video “Honk“  has been making the rounds this week:

At the moment I seem to be seeing everything through the lens of persuasion and in that context, this video is interesting for two reasons:

  1. The way in which it communicates a clear, and I think persuasive, message to the viewer using humour and a single sound argument. However it is also interesting to note that the main thrust of the argument is communicated without words. Although there are verbal messages at the end the visual argument relies upon a generalised awareness of breast cancer and the necessity for mammograms in the viewer, and makes the basic argument that “you should get a mammogram performed” otherwise “a cancer might not be diagnosed”. However, the argument is “shifted” a little in that the surface message is “your breasts ‘honk’” and “you could lose your ‘honk’” concluding “this would be bad and upsetting”. It is not entirely clear whether the ‘honk’ relates to the breast, health, life, or all of these things. That said I think the lack of clarity in the specific message content of the video is part and parcel of communicating this kind of message via this medium and it is important that this kind of message is accompanied by more information, for example as part of a wider multi-media campaign, for those who want to find out more.
  2. The age of the women used in the video is interesting because they all look to be much younger, to my eyes, than the ages at which the U.K. screening program usually operates. I am not sure whether this is merely due to ageism on the part of the film makers or ageism in the general population, which the film makers have taken account of; the idea being that using older women, although correct in this context, might possibly detract from the message or ability to grasp audience attention.
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Two Senses of Persuasion

By Simon | Published: March 7, 2010

My last post about discovering the Institute for the Future generated more traffic than this little blog has ever seen before (although this isn’t actually saying a lot). One of the most interesting comments that I noticed was one that mentioned Aldous Huxley and persuasion.

I was pondering this all week and felt that it was time to draw a distinction between two form of persuasive technology, at least in the context of my previous post where I suggested that we wish to use persuasive and argumentative technology “to influence people to make the correct decisions”. In this context we have to ask the question, what do we mean by “make the correct decisions”?

I see two senses of this that can be delineated based upon viewpoint:

  1. In the first sense a correct decision is one that is made in the argumentation theoretic sense of a decision that is based upon sound and justifiable reasoning. This follows from the de facto meaning of scepticism in which we say that a sceptical reasoner will come to a decision if they have a reason to do so. In this sense persuasive technology can be seen as a supportive technology, helping people to come to concious decisions and ensuring that they understand their own reasons for doing so. Technically though this isn’t actually persuasion but is closer to a form of deliberation, in the Walton & Krabbe (1995, “Commitment in Dialogue”) sense, although to my mind, supporting the deliberative process is one of the more benign uses to which persuasive (and related) technologies could be put.
  2. The second sense is more coercive. In this sense a correct decision is from the perspective of the person directing the persuasive technology. The correct decision is whichever decision that that person wishes the audience to make. It is in this context that most forms of persuasive technology will probably be used as  it is the form of the technology that can be used to sell things and influence peoples behaviour.

A good place to start lucking at coercive persuasion from a layman’s perspective is probably with Douglas Rushkoff’s “Coercion” which explains how sellers use coercion, usually surrepticiously via psychological tricks and understanding of behaviour, to persuasde us to do what they want us to do. Because this sense of persuasion is already in the wild it makes sense to study it and to begin to identify and construct defences against it.

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The Persuasive Future of Technology

By Simon | Published: February 28, 2010

I found this blog run by the Future of Persuasion: Future as Persuasion project at the Institute for the Future (IFTF). Persuading others is just one way that we make use of argumentation in order to achieve specific goals in the real world. This IFTF project proposes the following core research questions:

  1. What are the new directions of change in persuasive tech? In particular, we will track RT data/activity streams, modeling/simulation, augmented reality, video, haptic interfaces, mobile supercomputing with the cloud, and the cognitive web.
  2. What are the new directions of change in the science and art of persuasion?  We’ll look at behavioral psychology and economics, social networking, design thinking, neuroscience, and game theory.
  3. How is what we are persuading for changing? What new values and norms will emerge over the next decade that could change what we want to be persuaded about, or how others want to persuade us?  These could be as large as the concept of sustainability, or more narrow, such as the emergence of new parenting norms in the U.S.
  4. How are the agents of persuasion changing? The crowd and the individual are both agents gaining the power to persuade.  How will this change over the next decade and what will the new agents be?
  5. How is persuasive power being redistributed? Who is likely to gain more persuasive power, and who to lose it, over next decade?
  6. What might be new obstacles to persuasion?
  7. What are the implications of these changes for 5 important domains of persuasion in the next decade? Learning, Marketing/Advertising, Working/Belonging to an organization, Health, and Governance/Politics.

As software developers & technologists we can also look to how persuasive elements of interfaces can be designed in order to influence behaviour.

For example, visual feedback to the driver of a car indicating their fuel consumption can persuade the driver to modify their driving technique, influencing their behaviour for the better (the picture above illustrates the Ford Fusion dashboard in which a vine, on the right hand side, withers or thrives depending upon how economically the car is driven).

Similarly, visual interfaces that give feedback on home energy consumption can be made to make user feel worse about consuming more energy, and better about reducing our energy consumption, again influencing our behaviour as researchers at the Eindhoven Institute for Technology have done using the Phillips iCat:

One place to find out more about this is the AISB symposium’s on persuasive technology [2008, 2009] that have run over the last couple of years which have drawn together interface designers, interaction designers, and, persuasion, dialogue, and argumentation researchers to present work and discuss both how to build persuasive systems, and how to use them responsibly. I presented papers at both of these symposium’s, the first on MAgtALO, an agent-based dialogue system used to perform knowledge elicitation about the opinions held by real people on real subjects, and a paper on mapping the outputs from dialogue software, like InterLoc, onto argument structures represented in the Argument Interchange Format (AIF).

As I continue to develop argument blogging software to support online argumentation, I believe that persuasion will take a more central theme. At the surface level of the argument web, users will primarily attempt to persuade each other to accept the other’s standpoint, but there will come a time when we have sufficiently good corpora of structured argument and opinion that we also start to reuse argument oriented software to influence people to make the correct decisions.

Posted in argumentation, design, dialogue, persuasive technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Composing Music Using Dialogue

By Simon | Published: February 25, 2010

This article about David Cope starts off talking about generative music but takes an interesting turn about halfway through when it introduces the interface to Emily Howell, a virtual composer. From the description, the interface basically enables a composer to collaborate with the software composer by letting them engage in a dialogue about the piece of music that they want to create.

“This program would write music in an odd sort of way. Instead of spitting out a full score, it converses with Cope through the keyboard and mouse. He asks it a musical question, feeding in some compositions or a musical phrase. The program responds with its own musical statement. He says “yes” or “no,” and he’ll send it more information and then look at the output. The program builds what’s called an association network — certain musical statements and relationships between notes are weighted as “good,” others as “bad.” Eventually, the exchange produces a score, either in sections or as one long piece.”

I wonder how such a dialogue protocol could be tailored to support this kind of interaction. Could we develop protocols that support collaboration and yield well formed pieces of music? What would happen if we had two or more of these virtual composers conversing to produce music?

Posted in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), brainstorming, dialogue, interaction design | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment
  • StrangeAeons is the blog of Simon Wells, an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA), and MultiAgent Systems (MAS).

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