Persuasive technology is the general class of technologies that purposefully apply psychological principles of persuasion principles of credibility, trust, reciprocity, authority and the like in interactive media, in the service of changing their users attitudes and behavior. Only one year ago, in 2006, the first international conference in this area, PERSUASIVE 2006 was hosted in Eindhoven. The conference was entirely geared towards communicating the progress made in the area of persuasive technology, and towards presenting recent results in theory, design, technology and evaluation. It...

Persuasive technology is the general class of technology that has the explicit purpose of changing human attitudes and behaviours. Persuasive technologies apply principles of social psychology in influencing people; principles of credibility, trust, reciprocity, authority and the like. Social psychologists have spent a great deal of effort over many years in trying to understand how attitude and behaviour change comes about, focusing on the effectiveness of human persuaders, and the persuasive power of messages delivered through non-interactive mass-media, such as newspapers or television....