Unveiling the link between logical fallacies and web persuasion
This work addresses the problem of understanding persuasive web interactions for HCI researchers and practitioners, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing HCI focus.
The study investigated the connection between logical fallacies and persuasion strategies in web technologies, finding evidence through a pilot analysis of 150 e-commerce websites.
In the last decade Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has started to focus attention on forms of persuasive interaction where computer technologies have the goal of changing users behavior and attitudes according to a predefined direction. In this work, we hypothesize a strong connection between logical fallacies (forms of reasoning which are logically invalid but cognitively effective) and some common persuasion strategies adopted within web technologies. With the aim of empirically evaluating our hypothesis, we carried out a pilot study on a sample of 150 e-commerce websites.