research-article

Unconscious persuasion needs goal-striving: the effect of goal activation on the persuasive power of subliminal feedback

Authors:

Peter A. M. Ruijten,

Cees J. H. Midden,

Jaap HamAuthors Info & Claims

PERSUASIVE '11: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Persuasive Technology: Persuasive Technology and Design: Enhancing Sustainability and Health

Article No.: 4, Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/2467803.2467807

Published: 02 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

A fundamental characteristic of ambient persuasive technology is the ability to persuade users outside of conscious attention. One method of influencing people outside of their conscious awareness is subliminal priming: Presenting a stimulus for less than 50 milliseconds so people can not consciously perceive it but they are able to process the information unconsciously. Earlier research has shown that subliminal feedback on energy consumption leads to more optimal choices in an energy-related choice task compared with no feedback. Would subliminal feedback always be effective in influencing people's choices, or do people need to be motivated to reach a specific goal for it to work? In the current research, we investigate if persuasion by subliminal feedback comprises a goal-striving related process in which people strive for a goal and use the subliminal information to reach that goal. In an experimental study, half of the participants were primed with the goal to perform well, and the other half was not primed with this goal. Next, half of the participants received subliminal feedback in a learning task, whereas the other half received no feedback. Results indicated that participants primed with a performance goal made more correct choices in the task when given the subliminal feedback compared with given no feedback. Participants who were not primed with a goal were not influenced by this feedback. This finding indicates the need for a behavior-relevant goal to make subliminal information effective, which in turn has important implications for research and design of ambient persuasive technology.

References

[1]

Aarts, H., Dijksterhuis, A., & Midden, C. (1999). To plan or not to plan? Goal achievement or interrupting the performance of mundane behaviors. European Journal of Social Psychology, 29, 971--979.

[2]

Aarts, H., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2003). The silence of the library: Environment, situational norm, and social behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 18--28.

[3]

Bar, M., & Biederman, I. (1998). Subliminal visual priming. Psychological Science, 9, 464--469.

[4]

Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7, 230--244.

[5]

Davis, J. (2008). Towards participatory design of ambient persuasive technology. Presented at Persuasive Pervasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability, Workshop at the Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2008), Sydney, May 19--22.

[6]

Dijksterhuis, A., Aarts, H., & Smith, P. K. (2005). The power of the subliminal: On subliminal persuasion and other potential applications. In R. Hassin, J. Uleman, & J. Bargh (Eds.), The new unconscious, 77--106. New York: Oxford University Press.

[7]

Fishbach, A., Friedman, R. S., & Kruglanski, A. W. (2003). Leading us not into temptation: Momentarily allurements elicit overriding goal activation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 296--309.

[8]

Fogg, B. J. (2003). Persuasive technology: Using computers to change what we think and do. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, 2003.

Digital Library

[9]

Ham, J., Midden, C., & Beute F. (2009). Can ambient persuasive technology persuade unconsciously? Using subliminal feedback to influence energy consumption ratings of household appliances. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, April 26--29, 2009, Claremont, California.

Digital Library

[10]

Ham, J., Midden, C. (2010). Ambient persuasive technology needs little cognitive effort: The differential effects of cognitive load on lighting feedback versus factual feedback. Lecture notes in computer science, 6137, 132--142.

Digital Library

[11]

Hassin, R. R. (2008). Being open minded without knowing why: Evidence from nonconscious goal pursuit. Social Cognition, 26, 578--592.

[12]

Holland, R. W., Hendriks, M., & Aarts, H. (2005). Smells like clean spirit: Nonconscious effects of scent on cognition and behavior. Psychological Science, 16, 689--693.

[13]

Joly, J. F., Stapel, D. A., & Lindenberg, S. M. (2008). Silence and table manners: When environments activate norms. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1047--1056.

[14]

Kaptein, M. C., Markopoulos, P., Ruyter, B.d., & Aarts, E. (2010). Persuasion in ambient intelligence. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 1, 43--56.

[15]

Karremans, J. C., Stroebe, W., & Claus, J. (2006). Beyond Vicary's fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice. Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, 42, 792--798.

[16]

McCalley, L. T., & Midden, C. (2002). Energy conservation through product-integrated feedback: The roles of goal-setting and social orientation. Journal of Economic Psychology, 23, 589--603.

[17]

Midden, C., & Ham, J. (2008). The persuasive effects of positive and negative social feedback from an embodied agent on energy conservation behavior. In Proceedings of AISB Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, April 1--4, 2008, Aberdeen, Scotland. Bowman, M., Debray, S. K., and Peterson, L. L. 1993. Reasoning about naming systems. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 15, 5 (Nov. 1993), 795--825. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/161468.16147.

Digital Library

Cited By

Chen YHsu L(2022)Enhancing EFL Learners’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Learning English with Emoji Feedbacks in CALL: Why and HowBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1207022712:7(227)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/bs12070227
Borgefalk Gde Leon N(2019)The Ethics of Persuasive Technologies in Pervasive Industry Platforms: The Need for a Robust Management and Governance FrameworkAdvances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1007/978-3-030-17287-9_13(156-167)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17287-9_13
Pinder CVermeulen JCowan BBeale R(2018)Digital Behaviour Change Interventions to Break and Form HabitsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/319683025:3(1-66)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3196830
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Unconscious persuasion needs goal-striving: the effect of goal activation on the persuasive power of subliminal feedback

Recommendations

Can ambient persuasive technology persuade unconsciously?: using subliminal feedback to influence energy consumption ratings of household appliances
Persuasive '09: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology

In this paper we explore a fundamental characteristic of Ambient Persuasive Technology: Can it persuade the user without receiving the user's conscious attention? In a task consisting of 90 trials, participants had to indicate which of three household ...
Unconscious word processing engages a distributed network of brain regions

A briefly exposed visual stimulus may not be consciously perceived if it is preceded and followed by a dissimilar visual pattern or mask. Despite the subject's lack of awareness, prior behavioral studies have shown that such masked stimuli, nevertheless,...
The neural correlates of persuasion: A common network across cultures and media

Persuasion is at the root of countless social exchanges in which one person or group is motivated to have another share its beliefs, desires, or behavioral intentions. Here, we report the first three functional magnetic resonance imaging studies to ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

PERSUASIVE '11: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Persuasive Technology: Persuasive Technology and Design: Enhancing Sustainability and Health

June 2011

80 pages

ISBN:9781450306690

DOI:10.1145/2467803

Conference Chair:
Curtis P. Haugtvedt,
Editors:
Curtis P. Haugtvedt,
Agnis Stibe
[email protected]
,
Program Chair:
David Ewoldsen

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 June 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

PERSUASIVE '11

PERSUASIVE '11: The 6th International Conference on Persuasive Technology

June 2 - 5, 2011

Ohio, Columbus, USA

Acceptance Rates

PERSUASIVE '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 71 submissions, 15%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 32 of 137 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

6
Total Citations
View Citations
375
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)9
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 31 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Chen YHsu L(2022)Enhancing EFL Learners’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Learning English with Emoji Feedbacks in CALL: Why and HowBehavioral Sciences10.3390/bs1207022712:7(227)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/bs12070227
Borgefalk Gde Leon N(2019)The Ethics of Persuasive Technologies in Pervasive Industry Platforms: The Need for a Robust Management and Governance FrameworkAdvances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1007/978-3-030-17287-9_13(156-167)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17287-9_13
Pinder CVermeulen JCowan BBeale R(2018)Digital Behaviour Change Interventions to Break and Form HabitsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/319683025:3(1-66)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3196830
Kosmyna NTarpin-Bernard FRivet B(2015)Conceptual Priming for In-game BCI TrainingACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/280822822:5(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2808228
Pinder CVermeulen JBeale RHendley RBoring SRukzio EGellersen HHinckley K(2015)Exploring Nonconscious Behaviour Change Interventions on Mobile DevicesProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct10.1145/2786567.2794319(1010-1017)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2786567.2794319
Pinder CVermeulen JBeale RHendley RBoring SRukzio EGellersen HHinckley K(2015)Subliminal Priming of Nonconscious Goals on SmartphonesProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct10.1145/2786567.2793707(825-830)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2786567.2793707
Smids J(2012)The voluntariness of persuasive technologyProceedings of the 7th international conference on Persuasive Technology: design for health and safety10.1007/978-3-642-31037-9_11(123-132)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-31037-9_11

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten