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Don’t be afraid! Persuasive Practices in the Wild

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Abstract

Advisory service encounters evolve from providing expertise to joint problem-solving. Additionally, advisees depend on persuasion, which drives them to follow the advisor’s recommendations. However, advisors can be insufficiently equipped to persuade, resulting in advisees who are incapable of action or are unmotivated. Persuasive technology (PT) research proves that technology can motivate and enable people in single-user scenarios but pays limited attention to the natural realm of persuasion: the face-to-face conversation. This paper explores how persuasive technology transforms advice giving, a collaborative scenario involving an expert and a layperson. In such scenarios, IT does not act as a persuader but can provide affordances for persuasive practices, i.e., suggest new practices or enhance existing ones for convincing the advisee without deception or enforcement. We investigate the advisory practices in 24 real burglary prevention service encounters supported by IT. The paper shows the persuasive practices emerging through appropriation of the system, the tensions that govern the adoption or transformation of specific practices and routines and it confirms that studying the use and appropriation of technology uncovers organizational conflicts and tensions affecting such fundamental aspects as the advisor’s role and job description.

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Notes

  1. For simple gender balance and for clarity of the argument, we refer to the advisor (police officer) as a female (she, her) and to the advisee (citizen) as a male (he, his).

  2. Discussion of the political dimensions of open or implicit persuasion especially in light of the existence of such units as Social and Behavioral Sciences Team under the Obama administration (Kahneman 2011), goes beyond the scope of this article. We adhere to the standpoint, that persuasion efforts are legitimate as long as they follow persuadee’s interest and exclude deceipt or coercion of any kind.

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Acknowledgments

We send our best thanks to all police officers, who generously supported this study. Special gratitude to those who agreed to observations, shared their insights and observations with us, spent hours on discussing the issues, or helped us with formal issues. Roger, Hugo, Christoph, Rolf, Markus, Max, Michael P., Thomas, Stefan, Frank, Michael C., Sven, and Reinhard - without your assistance and openness this study would not have been possible. We thank Dr. Tino Comes for his hard work on SmartProtector design and development, as well as for his overall supportive attitude. Finally, our best thanks to the involved police departments for supporting the project financially and mentally.

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  1. Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Mateusz Dolata & Gerhard Schwabe

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  1. Mateusz Dolata
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Dolata, M., Schwabe, G. Don’t be afraid! Persuasive Practices in the Wild. Comput Supported Coop Work 27, 427–462 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-018-9330-4

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