Persuasive practices: Learning from home security advisory services

Abstract

Research on persuasive technologies (PT) focuses, primarily, on the design and development of IT for inducing change of individual’s behavior and attitude through computer-human and computer-mediated influence. The issue of practices in co-located human-human persuasive encounters remained unattended in the PT community. This study uses the notion of persuasive practices to understand the course of events in face-to-face home security advisory sessions – it specifies and illustrates such practices and discusses their impact on the persuasiveness of the encounter. Furthermore, it presents potential of IT to support such persuasive practices thus opening new research possibilities of PT research.