Tailoring Persuasive and Behaviour Change Systems Based on Stages of Change and Motivation

Abstract

Persuasive systems (PS) are effective at motivating behaviour change using various persuasive strategies. Research shows that tailoring these systems increases their effectiveness. However, there is little knowledge on how PS can be tailored to people's Stages of Change (SoC). We conduct a large-scale study of 568 participants to investigate how individuals at different SoC respond to various strategies. We also explore why the strategies motivate behaviour change using the ARCS motivation model. Our results show that people's SoC plays a significant role in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies and that the strategies motivate for different reasons. For instance, people at the precontemplation stage tend to be strongly motivated by self-monitoring strategy because it raises their consciousness or self-awareness. Our work is the first to link research on the theory of SoC with the theory of motivation and Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) model to develop practical guidelines to inform the tailoring of persuasive systems.