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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- How is persuasive power being redistributed? Who is likely to gain more persuasive power, and who to lose it, over next decade?
- What might be new obstacles to persuasion?
- 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.
