The Influence of Cognitive Ability on the Susceptibility to Persuasive Strategies

The realization that individuals may differ in their susceptibility to various persuasive strategies has motivated a shift of Persuasive Technology (PT) design from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to a personalized approach that adapts to individuals’ preferences. In Persuasive Educational Technologies (PETs) design, learners’ cognitive level is an important dimension for personalization given that it can affect learners’ response to and processing of various instructional contents. However, the relationship between students’ cognitive level and their level of susceptibility to persuasive strategies has not been explored quantitatively in the extant literature. As a result, we conducted an empirical study among 117 participants to investigate whether learners’ cognitive ability is an important trait to be considered in learner’s PETs design. Specifically, we assessed participants’ levels of Intelligent Quotient (IQ) and their responsiveness to three commonly used persuasive strategies in PT design: Social Comparison, Reward and Trustworthiness. Our results show that: (1) people with high cognitive level are more susceptible to Social Learning than people with low cognitive level; (2) people with low cognitive level are more susceptible to Trustworthiness than people with high cognitive level. Our results also show that there is no significant difference between people with high cognitive level and those with low cognitive level in their susceptibility to Reward strategy. Our findings provide insight into possible effective persuasive strategies which designers can employ to personalize PTs to individual users based on their cognitive level.

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