Marcia Stepanek is BW's Technology Strategies editor. A computerized doll coaxes your child to tell secrets. A Web-based auction company seduces you into placing bids by presenting itself as a game rather than as a shopping site.
Computers can help people follow safety guidelines, say, or learn new things.
But now that e-commerce is starting to embrace captology and use it to boost the effectiveness and reach of online marketing, captologists like B.J. Fogg of Stanford University worry that the line between persuasion and coercion could get breached easily. Neither the persuasion philosophies nor the technologies being employed by Web sites are new. But the marriage of the two is. So you can apply human methods of manipulation to the design of technology. Most Web sites already use persuasive strategies in some way, and not just for selling.