Persuasive Design Techniques in the Attention Economy: User Awareness, Theory, and Ethics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The systematic study of persuasion has captured researchers’ interest since the advent of mass influence mechanisms such as radio, television, and advertising. With the unprecedented growth of popular social media applications that are ubiquitously accessible on smart devices, consumers’ attention, attitudes, and behaviors are constantly influenced by persuasive design techniques on platforms that profit by maximizing users’ time spent on site. We take three different approaches - empirical, theoretical, and philosophical - to better understand the awareness, mechanisms, and ethicality of persuasive design techniques in the modern attention economy. Many users feel that these digital platforms draw them in and manipulate their time and behavior, but they lack a detailed awareness of persuasive design techniques in context of their use of the products. We discuss the creation and evaluation of a system called Nudget that makes persuasive design techniques visible on social media. We compare the effectiveness of our system in improving user knowledge of such techniques to traditional methods of educating users, finding a significant improvement when our system is used. Although there exists a rich social psychology literature on methods of persuasion and exploitable cognitive biases, we lack a mapping of the specific persuasive design techniques used by products like Facebook or LinkedIn onto this persuasive space. We take a theoretical approach to persuasive design with the goals of showing how design techniques interrelate to function as influential systems, and of providing a more nuanced vocabulary with which to discuss them, drawn from a range of relevant disciplines. We map our datasets of persuasive design techniques used on Facebook and LinkedIn onto existing theoretical frameworks in behavioral design, and also identify useful dimensions for future taxonomies. Finally, we find it important to include a detailed discussion of the ethical questions surrounding persuasive technologies in the attention economy. We discuss philosophical approaches to the balance between persuasive structure and human agency, and compile useful ethical heuristics to make progress on the question of what constitutes ethical persuasive design. We discuss the method of value-driven design as a way to create products designed for intention-fulfillment rather than impulse-fulfillment, and we provide a sample phenomenological analysis of a modern product to showcase how philosophy of technology can add value to our understanding of what technology adds and subtracts from our lives.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 13, 2018 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Vivrekar, Devangi |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | Symbolic Systems |
|---|---|
| Subject | SymSys |
| Subject | Human-Computer Interaction |
| Subject | HCI |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Vivrekar, Devangi. (2018). Persuasive Design Techniques in the Attention Economy: User Awareness, Theory, and Ethics. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/rq188wb9000
Collection
Master's Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University
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- Contact
- devangi.vivrekar@gmail.com
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