Persuasion and Culture: Individualism-Collectivism and Susceptibility to Influence Strategies

Personalizing persuasive technology increases their efficacy at influencing the desired behavior change. This paper explores how the responsiveness to Cialdini’s six persuasive strategies (authority, reciprocity, scarcity, liking, commitment, and consensus) vary by cultural background. The results of a large-scale study of 335 participants suggest that individualists and collectivists differ significantly with respect to their susceptibility to the strategies – with collectivists being more susceptible to most of the strategies. Some strategies are more suitable for persuading one cultural group than the other. Finally, the results show that irrespective of culture, some strategies are more persuasive overall and therefore more likely to influence participants from both cultures.

[1]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development , 2010, CHI.

[2]  James Noble,et al.  Our Place or Mine? Exploration into Collectivism-Focused Persuasive Technology Design , 2006, PERSUASIVE.

[3]  H. Triandis.  Individualism And Collectivism , 1995 .

[4]  Tugba Taskaya Temizel,et al.  The impact of individual differences on influence strategies , 2015 .

[5]  R. Cialdini.  The Science of PERSUASION. , 2001 .

[6]  Rita Orji,et al.  Exploring the Persuasiveness of Behavior Change Support Strategies and Possible Gender Differences , 2014, BCSS@PERSUASIVE.

[7]  Y. Aharoni.  Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind , 1992 .

[8]  M. L. Jones.  Hofstede - Culturally questionable? , 2007 .

[9]  Julie A. Kientz,et al.  Personality and Persuasive Technology: An Exploratory Study on Health-Promoting Mobile Applications , 2010, PERSUASIVE.

[10]  W. Clark,et al.  USING THE SIX PRINCIPLES OF INFLUENCE TO INCREASE STUDENT INVOLVEMENT IN PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS: A RELATIONSHIP MARKETING APPROACH , 2008 .

[11]  Julita Vassileva,et al.  Modeling the efficacy of persuasive strategies for different gamer types in serious games for health , 2014, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction.

[12]  E. Diener,et al.  Individualism: A Valid and Important Dimension of Cultural Differences Between Nations , 2005, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[13]  R. Cialdini,et al.  Preference for Consistency: The Development of a Valid Measure and the Discovery of Surprising Behavioral Implications , 1995 .

[14]  R. Orji,et al.  DESIGN FOR BEHAVIOUR CHANGE: A MODEL-DRIVEN APPROACH FOR TAILORING PERSUASIVE TECHNOLOGIES , 2014 .

[15]  Julita Vassileva,et al.  Gender, Age, and Responsiveness to Cialdini's Persuasion Strategies , 2015, PERSUASIVE.

[16]  M. Harjumaa,et al.  A Systematic Framework for Designing and Evaluating Persuasive Systems , 2008, PERSUASIVE.

[17]  Siddharth Suri,et al.  Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk , 2010, Behavior research methods.

[18]  Perry R. Hinton.  SPSS Explained , 2004 .

[19]  Regan L. Mandryk,et al.  Developing culturally relevant design guidelines for encouraging healthy eating behavior , 2014, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[20]  Michael D. Buhrmester,et al.  Amazon's Mechanical Turk , 2011, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[21]  B. J. Fogg,et al.  Persuasive technology: using computers to change what we think and do , 2002, UBIQ.

[22]  Harri Oinas-Kukkonen,et al.  Persuasive Systems Design: Key Issues, Process Model, and System Features , 2009, Commun. Assoc. Inf. Syst..

[23]  James Noble,et al.  Factoring culture into the design of a persuasive game , 2006, OZCHI '06.

[24]  Boris E. R. de Ruyter,et al.  Adaptive Persuasive Systems: A Study of Tailored Persuasive Text Messages to Reduce Snacking , 2012, TIIS.

[25]  Julita Vassileva,et al.  LunchTime: a slow-casual game for long-term dietary behavior change , 2013, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[26]  M. Bond.  Reclaiming the individual from Hofstede's ecological analysis--a 20-year odyssey: comment on Oyserman et al. (2002). , 2002, Psychological bulletin.

[27]  T. Neal.  Harnessing the Science of Persuasion for Expert Witness Testimony , 2015 .

[28]  Boris E. R. de Ruyter,et al.  Can You Be Persuaded? Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Persuasion , 2009, INTERACT.

[29]  James Noble,et al.  Persuasive interaction for collectivist cultures , 2006, AUIC.

[30]  Julita Vassileva,et al.  Modeling Gender Differences in Healthy Eating Determinants for Persuasive Intervention Design , 2013, PERSUASIVE.