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March 13, 2005
3 differences between "regular" persuasion and captology
Yesterday, somebody asked me what the difference between captology and "regular persuasion" was. There are a lot of similarities (both try to change attitudes and behaviors, both have many ethical concerns, etc) but there are also many differences. Here are a few factors of captology we've realized are different from traditional persuasion. (This short list isn't inclusive!)- Captology gives designers the ability to scale. BJ Fogg pointed this out in a talk we attended in Japan: "Even if you were the best salesman in the world, you could only affect a limited number of people. But if you wrote software to do the same thing, using tailored persuasion strategies, you could theoretically apply that to thousands of people at once." This is why Amazon can act as a mom-and-pop shop, giving you recommendations and personalized services as your corner store would.
- Captology is novel--but that's wearing off. In some of our studies, we were worried about users being persuaded simply because of the novelty of seeing things on a PDA, mobile phone, or computer screen. It's true--novelty is a powerful factor for persuading because it puts people in ambiguous situations where they look to external cues for guidance. We know from the literature that people are dramatically more susceptible when they are in novel on ambiguous situations. But we've been noticing that the novelty is wearing off quickly; people are familiar with most technologies now. In any case, novelty is a poor persuasion technique for long-term change. What this means is that captology designers have to go back to basics and read the persuasion literature to guide their designs. There are literally thousands and thousands of studies examining the details of persuasion. Did you know, for example, that group members who have to work extremely hard to join a group overvalue that group? Do you know which is more effective in persuasion, speaking first or last? Do you know how to induce (and resist) conformity? The literature is very clear on these questions. As captology designers, we can't just depend on novelty any more (plus it's fairly useless for inducing long-term change).
- Captology lets us rapidly test persuasion. If we implement a new captology design, we can distribute it to hundreds of people, test the design, analyze the findings, and iterate very quickly. With traditional persuasion, you can't do that. This isn't to say that captology is better or worse than traditional persuasion--there are different places for each. For example, your local Tiffany's Jewellers will probably always have human persuaders. But captology is different in the sense that testing and iterating becomes very easy and quick.
Posted by at March 13, 2005 09:28 AM
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