Personalizing Persuasive Technologies: Do Gender and Age Affect Susceptibility to Persuasive Strategies?

Personalizing Persuasive Technologies (PTs) increase their effectiveness at motivating desired behavioral change. However, most existing efforts towards personalizing PTs and developing personalization models were focused on people from the western countries. In this work, we focused on African audience to investigate how individual's responsiveness to three persuasive strategies (Reward, Social Learning, and Social Comparison) varies by Gender and Age group via a large-scale study of 712 participants. The results of a RM-ANOVA show significant differences in responsiveness to the strategies across the gender and age groups. Females are more responsive to the Reward and Social Learning strategies while males are more responsive to the social comparison strategy. People who are under 25 years are more likely to be persuaded by the Reward and social Learning than participants above 35 years who are more responsive to the Social Comparison strategy. The results will inform PT designers on the appropriate strategy to employ to personalize PTs to individual users based on their Age and Gender.