Doctoral course - Culture and Personality: Factors for Explaining Persuasion and Personalizing Persuasive Systems

Credit points: Students may obtain 0,5 ECTS (credit points) if they participate in all lectures.

Attendance: Students need to attend at least 8 hours of lectures to pass the course. They must also read an article and write a 300-word reflection if they miss 2 hours of the lectures.

Teacher: Assistant Prof. Kiemute Oyibo, York University, Toronto, Canada

Registration

https://forms.office.com/r/LbQ3QP3Bnn

Contact person: Eunice Agyei, eunice.agyei@oulu.fi, University of Oulu

Course Schedule

Monday 21.11.2022

Time: 10-14:00

Room: M101

Tuesday 22.11.2022

Time: 8-10:00

Room: LO 102

Thursday 24.11.2022

Time: 12-16:00

Room: LO 102

Abstract

Persuasive technologies are interactive systems designed with the intention to change human behaviors and attitudes through persuasion and social influence without coercion and deception. In various domains, they are often characterized by inequity such as cultural insensitivity and one-size-fits-all interface and information designs due to a lack of personalization to the target populations. This decreases their adoption rate and effectiveness among certain populations, in which cultural characteristics and unique attributes were not taken into consideration in the design and development of the persuasive systems targeted at them. In this guest lecture, it is demonstrated how culture and personality can be used to explain users’ behaviors and responsiveness to persuasive strategies using Oinas-Kukkonen’s Persuasive System Design (PSD) model and statistical techniques such as Structural Equation Modeling. Using my and other researchers’ empirical studies in the persuasive technology domain, it is shown how individualist and collectivist (aka low-context and high-context) cultures and the Big-Five personality groups differ in their behavioral determinants, motivational mechanisms, and interface and information-design preference using comparative analytical frameworks such as Hofstede’s and Hall’s cultural models. In conclusion, future work is presented on advancing culture- and personality-based research in the persuasive technology domain.

Short bio

Kiemute Oyibo is an Assistant Professor at York University. He is an early career researcher, who joined York University in the summer term of 2022. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan in 2020. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he worked on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a culture-tailored persuasive technology (fitness app) that aims to motivate exercise in individualist and collectivist cultures. The design and evaluation of the culture-tailored fitness app won the Gold Award at the Human-Computer Interaction International 2019 Student Design Competition in Florida. Upon completion of his Ph.D., he proceeded to do a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Waterloo from 2020 to 2022. His research proposal on designing contact tracing applications as persuasive technologies was nominated for the 2022 national Banting Fellowship competition by the University of Waterloo. He has published over 90 scientific papers in Persuasive Technology and Digital Health, which have received over 1000 citations on Google Scholar. He is currently working on the application of machine learning to persuasive system design to tackle digital health inequity.