Selecting Effective Means to Any End: Futures and Ethics of Persuasion Profiling

Interactive persuasive technologies can and do adapt to individuals. Existing systems identify and adapt to user preferences within a specific domain: e.g., a music recommender system adapts its recommended songs to user preferences. This paper is concerned with adaptive persuasive systems that adapt to individual differences in the effectiveness of particular means, rather than selecting different ends. We give special attention to systems that implement persuasion profiling — adapting to individual differences in the effects of influence strategies. We argue that these systems are worth separate consideration and raise unique ethical issues for two reasons: (1) their end-independence implies that systems trained in one context can be used in other, unexpected contexts and (2) they do not rely on — and are generally disadvantaged by — disclosing that they are adapting to individual differences. We use examples of these systems to illustrate some ethically and practically challenging futures that these characteristics make possible.