Title
A word of advice: how to tailor motivational text messages based on behavior change theory to personality and gender.
Abstract
Developing systems that motivate people to change their behaviors, such as an exercise application for the smartphone, is challenging. One solution is to implement motivational strategies from existing behavior change theory and tailor these strategies to preferences based on personal characteristics, like personality and gender. We operationalized strategies by collecting representative motivational text messages and aligning the messages to ten theory-based behavior change strategies. We conducted an online survey with 350 participants, where the participants rated 50 of our text messages (each aligned to one of the ten strategies) on how motivating they found them. Results show that differences in personality and gender relate to significant differences in the evaluations of nine out of ten strategies. Eight out of ten strategies were perceived as either more or less motivating in relation to scores on the personality traits Openness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness. Four strategies were perceived as more motivating by men than by women. These findings show that personality and gender influence how motivational strategies are perceived. We conclude that our theory-based behavior change strategies can be more motivating by tailoring them to personality and gender of users of behavior change systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s00779-017-1025-1
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Behavior change,Behavior change systems,Transtheoretical model,Processes of change,Tailoring
Social psychology,Big Five personality traits,Extraversion and introversion,Computer science,Knowledge management,Openness to experience,Human–computer interaction,Transtheoretical model,Operationalization,Agreeableness,Personality,Behavior change
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
21
4
1617-4909
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
7
0.48
7
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Roelof de Vries1294.31
Khiet P. Truong230232.64
Cristina Zaga383.93
Jamy Li415617.28
Vanessa Evers583680.72