Salam & good day,
It is common to praise someone, with a little agenda within. :-), the art of persuasion? perhaps!
Persuasion, is a simple word to describe "weapons of influence". It is entirely relying on typical sense appealing situation, that eventually might be right, or wrong, or rather in the both borders. There are (too many) many theories have derived to explain how we are capable to influence others. You may see it is coming to you, many times. Look at the salespersons, your boss (opps....), your partners, your spouse, your parents, your kids, ......, err..... your pets?
In many ways, they will manage to influence, (at least), up to at certain levels, that you might compromise your thought (or firm beliefs?) .
Okay, how about the machine that will do they same?
Sounds like a culprit in sci-fi movies? nope, it is happening now. Online buying, commercials, ...... etc etc. The combination of the Internet, the Web, and technology has democratized many things almost beyond recognition.
In computer science, the study of computers/machine as persuasive technologies is called "captology". Most of the persuasive technology research focuses on interactive, computational technologies, including desktop, gaming, and mobile devices. It can also be categorized by whether they change attitude or behaviors through direct interaction or through a mediating role. By manipulating (or playing) with our personality, intention, desires, .....using several ways ~ logical reasoning, proofs, emotions, and seduction (hmmm), these kind of technologies are able to act as a medium to "ask" you to do something.
Persuasive technologies can constructively change behaviors in health, safety, and education. Sort of allowing a personalized-media to help humans improve themselves. Part of my work is to explore on a computational model to design such behaviors in machines. It involves several complex human-to-machine interaction processes. Not to mention important issues such as believability, trust, behaviors, and so forth. *errrr....just leave it to me with those crappy stuffs, :-)
There are several success stories regarding to the possitive parts of having these persuasive technologies around us. For example, the Autom, a robotic coach prototype to help people to stay in the weight loss programme. (the earlier version can be viewed here)
It is common to praise someone, with a little agenda within. :-), the art of persuasion? perhaps!
Persuasion, is a simple word to describe "weapons of influence". It is entirely relying on typical sense appealing situation, that eventually might be right, or wrong, or rather in the both borders. There are (too many) many theories have derived to explain how we are capable to influence others. You may see it is coming to you, many times. Look at the salespersons, your boss (opps....), your partners, your spouse, your parents, your kids, ......, err..... your pets?
In many ways, they will manage to influence, (at least), up to at certain levels, that you might compromise your thought (or firm beliefs?) .
Okay, how about the machine that will do they same?Sounds like a culprit in sci-fi movies? nope, it is happening now. Online buying, commercials, ...... etc etc. The combination of the Internet, the Web, and technology has democratized many things almost beyond recognition.
In computer science, the study of computers/machine as persuasive technologies is called "captology". Most of the persuasive technology research focuses on interactive, computational technologies, including desktop, gaming, and mobile devices. It can also be categorized by whether they change attitude or behaviors through direct interaction or through a mediating role. By manipulating (or playing) with our personality, intention, desires, .....using several ways ~ logical reasoning, proofs, emotions, and seduction (hmmm), these kind of technologies are able to act as a medium to "ask" you to do something.
Persuasive technologies can constructively change behaviors in health, safety, and education. Sort of allowing a personalized-media to help humans improve themselves. Part of my work is to explore on a computational model to design such behaviors in machines. It involves several complex human-to-machine interaction processes. Not to mention important issues such as believability, trust, behaviors, and so forth. *errrr....just leave it to me with those crappy stuffs, :-)
There are several success stories regarding to the possitive parts of having these persuasive technologies around us. For example, the Autom, a robotic coach prototype to help people to stay in the weight loss programme. (the earlier version can be viewed here)
or "Baby Think it Over" used in high-school parenting classes in USA,
or Just-in-time information for exercise adaption
and many more.
But, it has also used for destructive purposes such as manipulation and coercion. Hang out, do not be afraid. The most important is, we should know the boundary, since persuasion is a nasty thing when it turns ugly. We are human, the best creation on earth. :-). Know the rules, you will safe.
Pakcik said: Hmm, do you think i write this blog "persuasively" enough?..heh...heh...., no worries, i do not care that much. :-)
4 comments:
Assalamualaikum,
Salam perkenalan. Bump into your blog from jumper's blog. WOW ! you are a Malaysian scientist in Amsterdam. Salute..
You are officially the first Malaysian I know who lives in Amsterdam. Hope we could meet someday.
Very interesting blog you have. I bookmarked it already for daily visit.
cheers bro.
salam syam,
thanks for coming over. virtually :-)
not many people from malaysia here, and amsterdam is almost non-existence. ;-) .... do come over. amsterdam has a lot to offer. :-)
Salam and greetings,
At the behavioural level, I would interpret “persuasion” as another paradigm of association of reward/pain to a state of our behaviour (some people may have coined it as belief, desire, goal or target) that always brings us back to the learning theory of Pavlov’s based on some experiments on a dog. The theory has been successfully applied in many areas; education, sports, sales and so forth.
Well, we human tend to direct our attention when certain reward or pain is expected. The strength of association between reward/pain and behaviour, and also the strength of stimulus initially percept by our brain will vary the reaction time. This is what the psychologists postulate as the bottom up (stimulus from environment) and top-down (associated objects through some learning) cognitive processing… So, the more you learn a person, the more persuasive you can be! ;-)
There’s a part in our brain that controls emotion states that also plays a role in cognitive control. The part will be triggered when there is an error (reward/pain is not as expected) or conflicting response (conflicting rewards) at some level of cognitive processing prior to our action. Thus, at this point, I do also believe that there’s some emotional influence on our response or at least been also co-activated during the cognitive control… So if a person is able to bring some peaceful easy feeling into you, you’ll easily buy what the person say!
note: it is more fascinating to study this at the brain neuronal network level.
Cheers.
n.yussof - wow, thanks for such nice suggestions. yup, many theories are related to these fields.
reward-punishment is one of them. currently i am focusing on a simple behavioral contact, resembling the analytical parts of understanding social-interaction between human-to-human, and to put into mathematical equations.
yup, go deeper into in the links will meet me to the world of neurons. *something i will do next. thanks for the notes.
~ probably theory of mind provides the answer as well. :-)
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