How+is+Captology+Applied?

There are many areas where captology can and has been be successfully implemented including, SNS, energy conservation, community involvement, political involvement, e-commerce, health behaviour; both preventative and disease management. We will have a brief look at how captology has been applied to a couple of these areas. It is worth noting that even when individuals show a keen interest in a product or website and are likely to elaborate highly on the persuasive message, as a developer, you should in no way neglect the packaging of your advertising message as peripheral cues are also important.

**Social Network Systems (SNS)**
SNS are prime examples of applied captology and MIP. Facebook alone has persuaded over eight hundred million people to sign up for an account. Of those users over four hundred and eighty million are considered active daily users. So Facebook has been extremely successful in applying many of the basic principles of persuasion and in harnessing technology to persuade people to use its product. As an application developer using the Facebook platform, the audience for any new offering in enormous. These users already have access to the internet (as they are using Facebook) so they should have the ability to use any new application on the Facebook platform. As previously discussed, Fogg's Behaviour Model demonstrates that if the user already has the ability then if your new application can provide both motivation and a successful trigger to the user you can have a successful application. There are many examples of diverse but successful applications(Farmville, Castleville, Cityville, MyCalendar - Birthdays) and their usage statistics are available on a daily basis

Many established companies have now set up Facebook pages as part of their advertising outreach. When a Facebook user "likes" their page it advertises their brand to all of that users' "friends" with just one click. When they see it on their "wall" and as it comes from a "friend", they too are likely to click on it and so by combining the psychology of persuasion with the size of the audience on Facebook you can see the potential of captology and MIP.

media type="custom" key="12482292" Click to "like" IADT Cyberpsychology Facebook Page

**Web-based Health Behaviour Change Intervention:**
Use of the technologies to persuade and influence individuals for health behaviour change has been a rapidly expanding field of research and technology to provide health behaviour change interventions has proven to very successful. There are numerous applications, be they web-based therapy, eHealth systems, or online interventions, which can influence individuals in the prevention and treatment of many conditions. Computer applications to treat conditions such as alcohol problems, depression, diabetes, smoking and obesity have all been tested in controlled trials. Meta-Analysys of the resultant data supports the effectiveness of the these applications in the health promotion area in changing attitudes and behaviour of the participating individuals.

When designing and building behaviour change support or health systems Oinas-Kukkonen noted that persuasion is often incremental (See Fogg's 8 step design) and that direct and indirect routes are key persuasion strategies (See the ELM and Cialdini's Principles of Persuasion).

Demeris listed three important factors in the successful application of health captology. First, patients need to be educated about their disease. Second, tools must help patients measure the progress towards their goal. Thirdly, support systems should provide encouragement for continued effort on their health journey. Captology allows all of the above to work together in order to design successful behaviour change support systems.

If you are actively planning to use the pyschology of persuasion then it would be wise to consider the ethics in your design structure. Please have a look at some of the discussion around the use of ethics in captology. Next: Captology Ethics