More than sex: The role of femininity and masculinity in the design of personalized persuasive games

Abstract

The goal of persuasive games is to change behavior and attitudes in a desirable manner, e.g., to promote physical activity. Research has shown that personalized persuasive approaches are more successful than one-size-fits-all approaches. As a means for personalization, sex has been investigated with results showing that women are overall more persuadable than men. We argue that considering only a dichotomous sex-type categorization may not be able to fully capture the differences in the persuasiveness of persuasion strategies. To that end we apply a dimensional approach of capturing gender identity – femininity and masculinity. We investigate the relationship between masculinity, femininity, sex and the persuasiveness of ten persuasion strategies in an online study (n = 592). Results show that femininity is significantly associated with seven of the ten strategies, while sex does only show differences for two strategies, suggesting gender identity could be a reliable variable for personalizing persuasive games.