The ethical part of the project addresses moral issues that arise when using persuasive technology. Persuasive Technologies are technologies that are intentionally designed to change the attitude and or behavior of individuals. These types of technologies raise various ethical questions, many of which have to do with a conflict between the individual values of human agents and the social values that these technologies aim to promote. The philosophical part of our research will study the ethical issues of technological ‘persuasion’. The main research question is: What are morally acceptable means of technological ‘persuasion’?
The ethical questions we consider are prompted by the technological case study, which concerns energy-saving in truck-driving. However, most of these ethical issues are of a general nature. The ethical project thus starts from the level of the concrete technological case and moves on to the level of general ethical principles and design guidelines. This will be specifically relevant for the social, political and legal aspects of persuasive technology and for the public debate about it.
This research program investigates the psychological mechanisms and the ethical dilemmas of persuasive technology in two ways. First, we develop an in-depth empirical study of a concrete case where persuasive technology is under development: the energy management and safety of vehicles (cars, trucks). Vehicle simulators will be used to observe human agents using various forms of persuasive technology, where the most important variable will be the amount of control transferred from the user to the technological system. Second, we analyze the general psychological mechanisms, ethical dilemmas, and value conflicts at stake, which will result in design recommendations for developers of persuasive technology. Since persuasive technology is a perfectly generic technology our results will be important for many other areas as well.
Application deadline: 21st October 2010
