On the Impact of the Application Domain on Users’ Susceptibility to the Six Weapons of Influence

Abstract

Persuasive technology is gaining increasing attention nowadays. Researchers have proposed several approaches to support technology with persuasive capabilities inspired originally from the domain of social sciences. Cialdini’s six persuasive principles, known as the “six weapons of influence,” is an example of such techniques that are widely deployed in the persuasive technology domain. However, the literature lacks studies that asses the relationship between the domain, in which a persuasive technology is applied, and how the former is actually affecting the degree of persuasion achieved by Cialdini’s six persuasive principles. To bridge this gap, we investigate the effect of the application domain on users’ susceptibility to Cialdini’s principles. Two application domains were considered, namely an e-commerce recommender system and a movie recommender system. A within-subject study is conducted, and a total of 107 responses were collected. The results show that when using the same persuasive technique, the nature of the application domain affects the way users got persuaded by that technique. Hence, our findings suggest that the application area, as a contextual dimension, is an important factor that should be taken into consideration when designing persuasive systems.