Examining the research that was presented in Padua in May 2014 and why, ten years later, it reads more like a blueprint than an academic archive
Slow attention is rewarded in Padua, an Italian city. The university buildings contain centuries’ worth of accumulated knowledge in their stone, the piazzas are spacious and shaded, and the overall mood is one of leisurely seriousness. In hindsight, it appears to have been a suitable setting for a conference that was doing something subtly important, though nobody outside the field really noticed it at the time. Twenty-seven full papers and twelve shorter ones, chosen from fifty-eight submissions, were presented at the ninth International Conference on Persuasive Technology in May 2014. It is now a little uncomfortable to read what they created. The concepts are well known. Not because the papers gained notoriety, but rather because the topics they covered eventually became commonplace.
Persuasive, inspiring, and empowering video games were the conference’s unique theme that year. In 2014, mobile gaming had become completely popular, Candy Crush was at the height of its cultural saturation, and researchers were beginning to seriously consider whether game mechanics could be used to alter actual human behavior. Kevin Werbach argued that gamification should be viewed as a process rather than a collection of badges and leaderboards in his presentation, which would go on to become one of the most cited papers from that event. Reframing is more important than it may seem. It transformed gamification from a gimmick in design to something with real behavioral architecture at its core. Even though the academic community was still developing the theory, businesses were already paying attention.
The entire proceedings are remarkable for how widespread the anxiety was even at that point. Subliminal cues incorporated into human-computer interaction were the focus of one study on covert persuasive technologies. At the very least, the researchers took care to highlight the ethical significance of what they were investigating. Another examined the relationship between website credibility and click-through rates on sponsored content and discovered what anyone familiar with digital advertising might have surmised: a trustworthy-looking website lends its prestige to anything that sits next to it. Although the conference paper seldom gets the credit, that specific insight has since become a pillar of native advertising.
As you go through these titles, you get the impression that the Padua researchers were charting a path that industry would quickly take over. In essence, a team researching persuasive technology for lowering phone radio frequency emissions—a specialized issue at the time—asked how to create an application that modifies user behavior around a habit they don’t want to change. That is essentially the main design issue that underlies all subsequent behavior-modification products. An entire category of mental health apps that currently brings in billions of dollars annually was predicted by one paper on depression management using a web-based behavior change support system that operates without any in-person therapy. It’s reasonable to wonder if the commercial products followed the research’s caution.
“Do Persuasive Technologies Persuade?” by Juho Hamari, a review of ninety-five empirical studies, went on to receive over five hundred citations and is still, by most accounts, the most cited paper the conference has ever produced. Its main conclusion was cautious rather than triumphant: the results were highly context-dependent, the methods varied greatly, and the evidence was conflicting. The transition from academic paper to product roadmap did not always preserve that subtlety. It’s possible that when the concepts entered the market, the genuine uncertainty ingrained in the research was precisely what was lost.
Given how gambling platforms have changed since 2014, a paper on incorporating disruptions into online gambling interfaces to assist users in adhering to their self-imposed financial limits now reads almost poignantly. Another study on ambient lighting as a persuasive tool for energy efficiency, which uses color associations to influence thermostat behavior, is now firmly established in the smart home sector and owes nothing to the researchers. For applied research, that is not out of the ordinary. The authors of the ideas disappear from the room.
When taken as a whole, the PERSUASIVE 2014 proceedings depict a field at a particular moment of self-awareness—knowing that the tools under study were truly powerful, unsure of how far they should go, and functioning in a world that was about to surpass the majority of the guardrails under discussion. The ACM Digital Library and Springer continue to offer the papers. If nothing else, it’s worth reading to learn which conversations took place early and which ones weren’t loud enough.
