Personality-targeted persuasive gamified systems: exploring the impact of application domain on the effectiveness of behaviour change strategies

Abstract

Persuasive gamified systems for health are interventions that promote behaviour change using various persuasive strategies. While research has shown that these strategies are effective at motivating behaviour change, there is little knowledge on whether and how the effectiveness of these strategies vary across multiple domains for people of distinct personality traits. To bridge this gap, we conducted a quantitative study with 568 participants to investigate (a) whether the effectiveness of the persuasive strategies implemented vary within each domain (b) whether the effectiveness of various strategies vary across two distinct domains, (c) how people belonging to different personality traits respond to these strategies, and (d) if people high in a personality trait would be influenced by a persuasive strategy within one domain and not in the other. Our results show that there are significant differences in the effectiveness of various strategies across domains and that people's personality plays a significant role in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies both within and across distinct domains. The Reward strategy (which involves incentivizing users for achieving specific milestones towards the desired behaviour) and the Competition strategy (which involves allowing users to compete with each other to perform the desired behaviour) were effective for promoting healthy eating but not for smoking cessation for people high in Conscientiousness. We provide design suggestions for developing persuasive gamified interventions for health targeting distinct domains and tailored to individuals depending on their personalities.

Keywords: Healthy eating; Human–computer interaction; Personality; Persuasive strategies; Persuasive system; Persuasive technology; Smoking cessation.

Fig. 1

High Fidelity prototype illustrating the Competition strategy in the healthy eating (A) and smoking cessation (B) domains

Fig. 2

Participants' demographic information

Fig. 3

PLS-SEM model structure for each domain. (P1–P5 = Rating responses of the five persuasiveness scale questions; EXT 1, EXT2 … OPE 1, OPE 2 = Rating responses to the two personality scale questions for each personality trait)

Fig. 4

The boxplot shows the overall persuasiveness (y-axis) of the 5 persuasive strategies (x-axis) for the smoking cessation domain on a scale of 1 to 7. A higher number indicates a higher persuasiveness. The horizontal line indicates a neutral value of 4

Fig. 5

The boxplot shows the overall persuasiveness (y-axis) of the 5 persuasive strategies (x-axis) for healthy eating domain on a scale of 1 to 7. A higher number indicates a higher persuasiveness. The horizontal line indicates a neutral value of 4

Fig. 6

Mean scores of the effectiveness of the strategies for healthy eating and smoking cessation

Fig. 7

Mean scores of the effectiveness of the strategies for healthy eating and smoking cessation