Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2023 Sep 29:6:1125191.
doi: 10.3389/frai.2023.1125191. eCollection 2023.

A panoramic view of personalization based on individual differences in persuasive and behavior change interventions

Affiliations
Review

A panoramic view of personalization based on individual differences in persuasive and behavior change interventions

Alaa Alslaity et al. Front Artif Intell. .

Abstract

Persuasive technologies are designed to change human behavior or attitude using various persuasive strategies. Recent years have witnessed increasing evidence of the need to personalize and adapt persuasive interventions to various users and contextual factors because a persuasive strategy that works for one individual may rather demotivate others. As a result, several research studies have been conducted to investigate how to effectively personalize persuasive technologies. As research in this direction is gaining increasing attention, it becomes essential to conduct a systematic review to provide an overview of the current trends, challenges, approaches used for developing personalized persuasive technologies, and opportunities for future research in the area. To fill this need, we investigate approaches to personalize persuasive interventions by understanding user-related factors considered when personalizing persuasive technologies. Particularly, we conducted a systematic review of 72 research published in the last ten years in personalized and adaptive persuasive systems. The reviewed papers were evaluated based on different aspects, including metadata (e.g., year of publication and venue), technology, personalization dimension, personalization approaches, target outcome, individual differences, theories and scales, and evaluation approaches. Our results show (1) increased attention toward personalizing persuasive interventions, (2) personality trait is the most popular dimension of individual differences considered by existing research when tailoring their persuasive and behavior change systems, (3) students are among the most commonly targeted audience, and (4) education, health, and physical activity are the most considered domains in the surveyed papers. Based on our results, the paper provides insights and prospective future research directions.

Keywords: adaptation; individual differences; personalization; persuasive technology; user modeling.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Included study identification process flow diagram.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Distribution of papers by year.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Distribution based on publication type.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Distribution by publisher.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Distribution of application domains.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Distribution of papers by personalization aspects.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Models and theories.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Scales and inventories.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Technology platforms.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Target outcome.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Evaluation method.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Distribution of papers by the audience.
Figure 13
Figure 13
Distribution of papers based on study duration.

References

    1. Abdullahi A. M., Orji R., Kawu A. A. (2019a). Gender, age and subjective well-being: towards personalized persuasive health interventions. Information 10, 301. 10.3390/info10100301 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Abdullahi A. M., Orji R., Nwokeji J. C. (2019b). “Personalizing persuasive educational technologies to learners' cognitive ability,” in Proceedings - Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE 2018-October (San Jose, CA: IEEE; ). 10.1109/FIE.2018.8658733 - DOI
    1. Abdullahi A. M., Oyibo K., Orji R. (2018). “The influence of cognitive ability on the susceptibility to persuasive strategies,” in CEUR Workshop Proceedings 2089 (Waterloo, ON: Springer Link; ), 22–33.
    1. Adaji I. (2017). “Towards improving e-commerce users experience using personalization and persuasive technology,” in UMAP 2017 - Proceedings of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery; ), 318–321. 10.1145/3079628.3079707 - DOI
    1. Adnan M., Mukhtar H., Naveed M. (2012). “Persuading students for behavior change by determining their personality type,” in 2012 15th International Multitopic Conference, INMIC 2012 (Islamabad: IEEE; ), 439–449. 10.1109/INMIC.2012.6511472 - DOI