My Freedom: Assessing Reactance in a High Freedom Persuasive Website

Abstract

The freedom concept has been an important one, to daily engagement in activities and everything that becomes so close to people. One of them is computing systems that we use every day and they serve several purposes in moulding human lives. An important aspect of this is behaviour change as many have been successful while others have failed because they are too restrictive for use. However, the presence of freedom does not guarantee the success of many systems. Therefore, this work focuses on how reactance can still be experienced in a persuasive website that ensures freedom and non-forced compliance. Specifically, the work studied anger, compliance and perceived usability of a persuasive website that was developed to provide intervention for users in the area of healthy meal planning through manipulation of freedom levels. Results indicated that participants exposed to high freedom text had lower anger, higher perceived usability and higher compliance than participants exposed to low freedom text and social high freedom message. This led to the conclusion that users’ freedom feeling during a persuasive attempt can be boosted with the inclusion of high freedom message design and that the integration of social agents for persuasion enhancement must be done with great care.Keywords: Psychological Reactance, Freedom, Behaviour change, Social Influence, compliance, persuasion, computing devices