Kindness Makes You Happy and Happiness Makes You Healthy: Actual Persuasiveness and Personalisation of Persuasive Messages in a Behaviour Change Intervention for Wellbeing

Abstract

Happiness, or subjective wellbeing, brings lasting positive effects to individuals, communities, and societies. Intentional engagement in kind behaviours can have a significant effect on increasing and sustaining subjective wellbeing in humans. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of a behaviour change intervention for kindness and subjective wellbeing. Using decision tree learning and training data on personality and susceptibility to Cialdini’s persuasive principles, we developed a machine learning model to predict the most effective persuasive principle for an individual. We conducted a randomised controlled experiment to evaluate two interventions (personalised and non-personalised) to motivate kind behaviours. The results indicate that personalised persuasive messages are more effective at stimulating kind behaviours. However, both interventions were effective at improving behavioural intention and subjective wellbeing. These findings have implications for future work on personalisation and design of adaptive behaviour change interventions.