Influencing the Others’ Minds: an Experimental Evaluation of the Use and Efficacy of Fallacious-reducible Arguments in Web and Mobile Technologies

PsychNology Journa 12 (3):87-105 (2014)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has nowadays extended its attention to the study of persuasive technologies. Following this line of research, in this paper we focus on websites and mobile applications in the e-commerce domain. In particular, we take them as an evident example of persuasive technologies. Starting from the hypothesis that there is a strong connection between logical fallacies, i.e., forms of reasoning which are logically invalid but psychologically persuasive, and some common persuasion strategies adopted within these technological artifacts, we carried out a survey on a sample of 175 websites and 101 mobile applications. This survey was aimed at empirically evaluating the significance of this connection by detecting the use of persuasion techniques, based on logical fallacies, in existing websites and mobile apps. In addition, with the goal of assessing the effectiveness of different fallacy-based persuasion techniques, we performed an empirical evaluation where participants interacted with a persuasive (fallacy-based) and with a non-persuasive version of an e-commerce website. Our results show that fallacy-based persuasion strategies are extensively used in existing digital artifacts, and that they are actually effective in influencing users’ behavior, with strategies based on visual salience manipulation (accent fallacy) being both the most popular and the most effective ones.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Surveillance and persuasion.Michael Nagenborg - 2014 - Ethics and Information Technology 16 (1):43-49.
War is persuasion.Harry B. Burke - 2009 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 21 (1):1-3.
Patient preferences for physician persuasion strategies.Dan O'Hair - 1986 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 7 (2).
Fallacies of Accident.David Botting - 2012 - Argumentation 26 (2):267-289.
What is a Sophistical Refutation?David Botting - 2012 - Argumentation 26 (2):213-232.
Peter Winch on the Concept of Persuasion.Raffaele Durante - 2015 - Philosophical Investigations 39 (2):100-122.

Analytics

Added to PP
2016-09-23

Downloads
736 (#19,698)

6 months
143 (#19,284)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Antonio Lieto
University of Turin

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Fallacies.C. L. Hamblin - 1970 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 160:492-492.
A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy.Douglas Walton - 2003 - University Alabama Press.
An Introduction to Logic.Morris R. Cohen, Ernest Nagel & John Corcoran - 1994 - Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30 (4):1064-1068.
An introduction to logic.Morris Raphael Cohen - 1962 - New York,: Harcourt, Brace & World. Edited by Ernest Nagel.

View all 6 references / Add more references