Behavioural Change Support Intelligent Transportation Applications

This workshop invites researchers and practitioners to participate in exploring behavioral change support intelligent transportation applications. We welcome submissions that explore intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which interact with travelers in order to persuade them or nudge them towards sustainable transportation behaviors and decisions. Emerging opportunities including the use of data and information generated by ITS and users' mobile devices in order to render personalized, contextualized and timely transport behavioral change interventions are in our focus. We invite submissions and ideas from domains of ITS including, but not limited to, multi-modal journey planners, advanced traveler information systems and in-vehicle systems. The expected outcome will be a deeper understanding of the challenges and future research directions with respect to behavioral change support through ITS.Comment: Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC) 2017 Worksho

Promoting Sustainable Mobility: To What Extent Is “Health” Considered by Mobility App Studies? A Review and a Conceptual Framework

Promoting cycling and walking in cities improves individual health and wellbeing and, together with public transport, promotes societal sustainability patterns. Recently, smartphone apps informing and motivating sustainable mobility usage have increased. Current research has applied and investigated these apps; however, none have specifically considered mobility-related health components within mobility apps. The aim of this study is to examine the (potential) role of health-related information provided in mobility apps to influence mobility behavior. Following a systematic literature review of empirical studies applying mobility apps, this paper (1) investigates the studies and mobility apps regarding communicated information, strategies, and effects on mobility behavior and (2) explores how, and to what extent, health and its components are addressed. The reviewed studies focus on environmental information, especially CO2-emissions. Health is represented by physical activity or calories burned. The self-exposure to air pollution, noise, heat, traffic injuries or green spaces is rarely addressed. We propose a conceptual framework based on protection motivation theory to include health in mobility apps for sustainable mobility behavior change. Addressing people’s self-protective motivation could empower mobility app users. It might be a possible trigger for behavior change, leading towards healthy and sustainable mobility and thus, have individual and societal benefits.Peer Reviewe

An Exploratory Study on Customer Responses to Personalized Banner Messages in the Online Banking Context

In the 21st century the quantity of research on personalization has grown exponentially. New technologies enable efficient interaction with customers, even on one-to-one basis, providing the right content in the right format to the right person at the right time. The latest developments with “big data” analytics promise unprecedented opportunities for personalization, even in real-time. Although the technological advances allow fancy enhancements in personalization, it is imperative that the context-specific customer attitudes towards online personalization are taken into account by businesses. Customers are increasingly aware of their privacy, which improper personalization may intrude. This article presents the results of a two-phase study. Focus group interviews uncovered first the perceptions of bank customers regarding personalized marketing communication on online bank. A subsequent exploratory study investigated the online behaviour of customers, that is, their genuine responses to personalized messages. In this phase, bank customers were shown personalized banner advertisements when they logged in to their bank service. We studied, among others, the click-through rates and navigational behaviour and compared the effectiveness of personalized banners to default banners, and to traditional direct-mail messages. The personalized banners attracted more attention than default banners. In two of the three cases, the actual sales were also higher than in the case of direct-mail promotion. The results offer implications both for research and practice

Matching consistency effects in persuasion: distinguishing between consistent and mixed framed messages

Dissertação de Mestrado realizada sob a orientação do Professor Doutor Filipe Loureiro apresentada no Ispa – Instituto Universitário para obtenção de grau de Mestre na especialidade de Psicologia Social e das Organizações.Alinhar o conteúdo de mensagens com características dos destinatários (i.e., matching) é uma estratégia persuasiva frequentemente associada a atitudes favoráveis e intenções comportamentais. Contrariamente a estudos anteriores focados em exposições a mensagens únicas, adotamos uma abordagem original. Controlámos diferenças de necessidade de cognição (NC) e expusemos os participantes a dois anúncios. Nas condições consistentes, as mensagens de ambos os anúncios alinhavam-se ou não ao traço de extroversão. Nas condições inconsistentes, uma alinhava-se e a outro não (ou vice-versa). Previsões em relação às atitudes nas condições consistentes foram contrariadas. Especificamente, anúncios matching consistentes não resultaram em atitudes mais favoráveis, desafiando o efeito de favorabilidade para mensagens matching, habitualmente retratado na literatura. Diferenças na certeza das atitudes com base na consistência dos anúncios também não foram confirmadas. Esperávamos que as condições consistentes promovessem níveis mais elevados de certeza, mas não encontrámos diferenças na certeza entre condições consistentes e inconsistentes. Adicionalmente, indivíduos com NC elevado não relataram maior certeza. Assim, os resultados contrariaram estudos anteriores que relacionam a inconsistência à redução da certeza e o NC elevado ao aumento da certeza. Apesar de não apoiarem as nossas previsões em relação às atitudes e certeza, os dados obtidos revelaram uma relação significativa entre ambas. As atitudes exerceram uma influência notável nas intenções comportamentais, especialmente quando os indivíduos estavam muito certos das suas atitudes, reforçando evidencias anteriores da existência desta moderação. De forma exploratória, descobrimos padrões interessantes nas condições inconsistentes, com variações em NC a resultarem em efeitos distintos nas três variáveis em estudo.ABSTRACT: Aligning message content with recipients’ characteristics (i.e., matching), is a persuasive strategy often associated with favorable attitudes and behavioral intentions. Unlike previous research focusing on single message exposures, we employed a unique approach. We controlled for differences in need for cognition (NC) and exposed participants to two advertisements. In consistent conditions the frames of both advertisements either consistently matched or mismatched their extroversion trait. In inconsistent conditions, one matched and the other mismatched (or vice versa). Our predictions regarding attitudes in response to the exposure of consistent frames were contradicted. Specifically, consistent matching advertisements did not yield more favorable attitudes, challenging the established literature showing a favorability effect for matching messages. Anticipated differences in attitude certainty based on ads consistency were also not supported. We expected consistent conditions to lead to higher certainty levels, but our results revealed no difference in certainty between consistent and inconsistent conditions. Furthermore, we did not find that high NC individuals reported greater certainty than low NC individuals. These findings contrast previous literature linking inconsistency to reduced certainty and high NC to increased certainty. Despite not providing support to our predictions regarding attitudes or attitude certainty, obtained data revealed a significant relationship between the two. Attitudes notably influenced behavioral intentions, particularly when individuals were highly certain about their attitudes, thus reinforcing prior evidence supporting the existence of this moderation. In an exploratory endeavor of the inconsistent conditions, we uncovered interesting patterns, with variations in NC leading to distinct effects across the three variables under study

Persuasive Systems Design: Key Issues, Process Model, and System Features

A growing number of information technology systems and services are being developed to change users’ attitudes or behavior or both. Despite the fact that attitudinal theories from social psychology have been quite extensively applied to the study of user intentions and behavior, these theories have been developed for predicting user acceptance of the information technology rather than for providing systematic analysis and design methods for developing persuasive software solutions. This article is conceptual and theory-creating by its nature, suggesting a framework for Persuasive Systems Design (PSD). It discusses the process of designing and evaluating persuasive systems and describes what kind of content and software functionality may be found in the final product. It also highlights seven underlying postulates behind persuasive systems and ways to analyze the persuasion context (the intent, the event, and the strategy). The article further lists 28 design principles for persuasive system content and functionality, describing example software requirements and implementations. Some of the design principles are novel. Moreover, a new categorization of these principles is proposed, consisting of the primary task, dialogue, system credibility, and social support categories

From mobility patterns to behavioural change: leveraging travel behaviour and personality profiles to nudge for sustainable transportation

Rendering transport behaviours more sustainable is a pressing issue of our times. In this paper, we rely on the deep penetration of mobile phones in order to influence citizens’ behavior through data-driven mobility and persuasive profiles. Our proposed approach aims to nudge users on a personalized level in order to change their mobility behavior and make more sustainable choices. To achieve our goal, first we leverage pervasive mobile sensing to uncover users’ mobility patterns and use of transportation modes. Second, we construct users’ persuadability profiles by considering their personality and mobility behavior. With the use of the aforementioned information we generate personalized interventions that nudge users to adopt sustainable transportation habits. These interventions rely on persuasive technologies and are embedded in a route planning application for smartphones. A pilot study with 30 participants using the system for 6 weeks provided fairly positive evaluation results in terms of the acceptance of our approach and revealed instances of behavioural change. Document type: Articl