Ethical persuasion profiling?
Persuasion profiling — estimating the effects of available influence strategies on an individual and adaptively selecting the strategies to use based on these estimates — sounds a bit scary. For many, ‘persuasion’ is a dirty word and ‘profiling’ generally doesn’t have positive connotations; together they are even worse! So why do we use this label?
In fact, Maurits Kaptein and I use this term, coined by BJ Fogg, precisely because it sounds scary. We see the potential for quite negative consequences of persuasion profiling, so we try to alert our readers to this.1
On the other hand, we also think that, not only is persuasion profiling sometimes beneficial, but there are cases where choosing not to adapt to individual differences in this way might itself be unethical.2 If a company marketing a health intervention knows that there is substantial variety in how people respond to the strategies used in the intervention — such that while the intervention has positive effects on average, it has negative effects for some — it seems like they have two ethical options.
First, they can be honest about this in their marketing, reminding consumers that it doesn’t work for everyone or even trying to market it to people it is more likely to work for. Or they could make this interactive intervention adapt to individuals — by persuasion profiling.
Actually for the first option to really work, the company needs to at least model how these responses vary by observable and marketable-to characteristics (e.g., demographics). And it may be that this won’t be enough if there is too much heterogeneity: even within some demographic buckets, the intervention may have negative effects for a good number of would-be users. On the other hand, by implementing persuasion profiling, the intervention will help more people, and the company will be able to market it more widely — and more ethically.
A simplified example that is somewhat compelling to me at least, but certainly not airtight. In another post, I’ll describe how somewhat foreseeable, but unintended, consequences should also give one pause.
- You might say we tried to build in a warning for anyone discussing or promoting this work. [↩]
- We argue this in the paper we presented at Persuasive Technology 2010. The text below reprises some of what we said about our “Example 4” in that paper.
Kaptein, M. & Eckles, D. (2010). Selecting effective means to any end: Futures and ethics of persuasion profiling. Proceedings of Persuasive Technology 2010, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer. [↩]