Persuasive Social Actors

In this post, I will try to summarize the fifth chapter of the book "Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do" by Fogg. In the chapter how computers can provide a range of social cues that trigger social reactions in their human users is explored. Computers are considered as social  actors that can persuade their users through rewarding the users with positive feedback, modeling a target behavior or attitude and providing social support.

Persuasion dynamics (social influence) are expressed as normative influence (peer pressure), social comparison, group polarization and social facilitation.

Normative social influence: is the influence of peer people that lead us to shape our attitudes, values or behaviors to conform them.

Social comparison (keep up with the Joneses): is based on the idea that people perform self-evaluations by comparing themselves to others in order to reduce uncertainties in their domain.

Group polarization: is the case when groups make a decision affected by its members' initial attitude, and the decision is more severe than initial tendency.

Social facilitation: is the inclination of people to perform better in simple tasks or the tasks they are good at doing when they are being watched or observed by others. However, if the tasks are not simple then performance might be affected adversely because of nervousness.

The writer introduces five social cues that make people to see computers as though they were living beings. These cues are physical, psychological, language, social dynamics and social roles, which are briefly explained with their influences as follows.

Physical Cues (e.g., face,eyes,body and movement)

It is possible to produce computing devices that can have physical attributes such as eyes, a mouth and movement. These attributes can be facilitated to convey social presence and persuade their human users. Also, physical attractiveness has a considerable impact in social influence. Hence, physically attractive device or interface might be more persuasive than unattractive ones. The attractiveness might create the halo effect, that leads users to believe that the product is also intelligent, capable, reliable and credible. However, the criteria for attractiveness changes from culture to culture,generation to generation and individual to individual.
- The Personality Study showed that people prefer computers whose 'personalities' match with them.
- The Affiliation Study showed that people who worked with a computer labeled as their teammate were more likely to conform the suggestions delivered by the computers.
Language
Computing technology can also convey social presence through simple interface elements like dialog boxes without physical attributes. Computing devices can utilize written or spoken language to convey social presence. Asking questions to perform a task, offering congratulations for completing a task, or reminding available software updates can lead people to infer that  the computing product is alive in some sense. One of the most effective persuasive uses of language is to offer praise. Offering praise by text, image or sound can lead users to be more open to persuasion.
Social Dynamics (unwritten rules for interacting with others)
In many cultures, there is a shared set of  patterns among people to interact with each other. These patterns construct social rules for interactions such as meeting people, taking turns and forming lines. Those who don't conform the rules pay a social price (e.g. being alienated).
- The Reciprocity Study, which is based on the principle that people will feel the need to reciprocate when computing technology has done a favor for them, showed that people worked with the same helpful computer on two tasks performed almost twice as much work for their computers on the second task as did the other participants.
Social Roles
Authority roles such as teacher, doctor, counselor and expert are played by people.  It is common to believe that authorities are intelligent and powerful. Computing products can act in these roles so that being in a position of authority will lead to self-inflicted influence. Computing technology that assumes roles of authority will have enhanced powers of persuasion. Designers should provide different social roles for their target audience, such roles might be a octor, servant or commander.

* It should be kept in mind that unnecessary social cues might cause distracted and annoyed users.