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A computerized doll coaxes your child to tell secrets. A Web-based auction company seduces you into placing bids by presenting itself as a game rather than as a shopping site. A monitoring system in the restroom of the restaurant where your teenager works on weekends issues a friendly, flashing reminder to wash his hands -- and then logs his identity if he ignores it.
Such is the work of a brand-new technology called "captology," which enables computers to persuade users through humor, flattery, or some other positive reinforcement to alter their behavior.
Computers can help people follow safety guidelines, say, or learn new things. But now that e-commerce is starting to embrace captology and use it to boost the effectiveness and reach of online marketing, captologists like B.J. Fogg of Stanford University worry that the line between persuasion and coercion could get breached easily.
FIVE SERVINGS.
Neither the persuasion philosophies nor the technologies being employed by Web sites are new. But the marriage of the two is. "Psychologists know a lot about human-to-human interaction," says Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford. "So you can apply human methods of manipulation to the design of technology."
Most Web sites already use persuasive strategies in some way, and not just for selling. "It could be getting you to register, getting you to share personal information, getting you to bookmark the site, and so on," says Fogg, who heads up Stanford's Persuasive Technology Laboratory and coined the word "captology."
Dole Food Corp., for example, has created a persuasive technology that it calls 5-a-Day Adventures. It's a CD-ROM aimed at kids that uses animated characters, music, and games to encourage children to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables per day rather than the recommended three.
LITTLE FINK.
At Drugstore.com Inc., persuasive technologies are used to get highly personal information from consumers, then guide them to the "right products." After learning a shopper's skin type, age, and allergies, a computer agent, or "adviser," could recommend a sunscreen product with the proper sun-protection factor (SPF). It would also offer to explain what SPF means, give tanning advice, and provide links to related topics such as skin cancer.
Corporate applications of captology could use persuasive technology to direct users toward higher-level goals, Fogg says. A purchasing system could encourage the use of preferred vendors -- those felt to be environmentally responsible, for example -- while discouraging doing business with unfriendly nations. But the question becomes, says Fogg: "Who's setting these policies? You start to get into questions of persuasion vs. coercion."
Not to mention privacy. Persuasive technologies could represent a new threat to privacy if they trick users into giving up information or taking actions that they might later regret. But sometimes, it's a fuzzy call. Playmates Toys Inc. has come out with Baby Whispers, a doll that prompts a child to tell secrets. Privacy advocates worry that the doll could be progammed to record those secrets, which might later be accessed by a parent or teacher. The idea might well be put to beneficial use by parents. But the concept remains very troubling to privacy advocates. "Here are kids looking to the computer as a confidant, not as a tracking device that pries their thoughts out of them," says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Media Education. (The company confirmed that the doll was on the market but otherwise declined to comment.)
EARLY WARNING.
Fogg warns that abuse of persuasive technologies -- "something as simple as persuading a child to type in their parents' credit-card number" -- raises the specter of Big Brother once again and could trigger new cries for government regulation.
Is his concern premature? Maybe not. An early review by the Federal Trade Commission of children's Web sites showed use of persuasive technologies to coerce demographic data out of children about themselves and their parents. And Fogg believes even worse abuses are inevitable. "When something really socially undesirable happens -- and it will -- the reaction would be to legislate strongly, and that could cut off a lot of great things that captology might do down the road," he says.
The upshot? Consumers, be aware that the computer isn't always simply a passive tool. As e-commerce matures, the whole point of interactivity will be to use the information a marketer can discover about you to influence your buying behavior. Know that such technologies are already in use and, in time, may go too far. When they do? Log off -- and be the wiser.
Stepanek's column runs twice a month on Business Week Online. She invites you to discuss these issues on our Priv EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
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