The Computer People

BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology sets out seven types of persuasive technology tools, or more accurately seven ways that technology tools work: reduction, tunnelling, tailoring, suggestion, self-monitoring, surveillance, and conditioning.

I’ve only read chapters 3 & 5 so far and I’ve found it useful in terms of providing a structure around which to think about ways that computers and other technology affect the ways we behave.

He has some interesting findings from various psychological studies that prove that people treat computers as people in certain circumstances, e.g. people tend to like computers that they perceive as being more like themselves in terms of dominance or submissiveness. There is certainly some persuasive potential if you can leverage the ways that people treat computers as social actors to get them to behave in certain ways.

Of course, just because you perceive someone as a social actor doesn’t mean you’re going to like them. You might even hate them. I guess that paper clip is the global outcast in the social network made up of people and their machines. Every body hates him and ignores him.

In terms of examples of particular persuasive technologies I was particularly intersted in the first method of persuasion Fogg identifies: that of reduction. Reduction means making a task so simple that the barrier to doing it is reduced to a point where you are far more likely to do it, and likely to do it more often.

There are a lot of websites right now offering little bits of javascript that you can move onto your browser and perform an action with just one click of something that is on your browser.

An example of this is New York Times Link Generator, where you can put a little bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar and just clicking it when you’re reading an article from the New York Times will generate a permanent link to that article that you can put on your blog. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but linking things to your blog is something you don’t want to have to spend a lot of time on – this makes it a lot more likely that I’ll link ot NY Times articles.