Paper Reading #4: There's a monster in my kitchen: Using Aversive Feedback to Motivate Behavior Change

Reference Information:

Title: There’s a Monster in my Kitchen: Using Aversive Feedback to Motivate Behaviour Change

Authors: Ben Kirman, Conor Linehan, Shaun Lawson, Derek Foster, Mark Doughty

Presentation venue: CHI 2010, April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Summary:

The paper talks about persuasive technology and how operant conditioning can be used to mold user behavior. The authors talk about how traditional behavioral interventions, including adaptation to individual users and increased use of aversive and appetitive stimuli. Behavioral psychology presumes that all behavior is determined by interactions with and feedback from the organisms' surrounding environment. Behavioral psychology suggests that because behavior is determined by the environment, it can be changed readily by analysis and manipulation of that environment. Behavioral psychology is the ideal framework within which to design persuasive technologies.

Terms:

Operant Conditioning describes the process whereby the consequences of behavior feed back to the organism and change the probability that the behavior that produced them will occur again.

Positive Reinforcement: Presentation of a stimulus as a consequence of an instance of behavior makes that behavior more likely to occur in that context in future.

Negative Reinforcement: removal of an existing stimulus as a consequence of an instance of behavior makes that behavior more likely to occur in that context in future.

Punishment: presentation of a stimulus as a consequence of an instance of behavior makes that behavior less likely to occur in the future.

However, the problem is that the same stimulus can function as a reinforcer for one person and a punisher for another. Persuasive technologies typically do not evaluate which stimuli, or types of stimuli, a person will work for, and which stimuli they find aversive.

The Nag-baztag is an internet connected agent that is able to monitor power usage on a per-appliance basis, and able to track water and gas usage through networked metering devices. The system has a variety of tools based on the operant conditioning techniques that can be used to attempt to effect positive behavior change in the user. The positive reinforcement used is to let the user know how much money he/she has saved by making efficient use of the resources. On the other hand, the negative reinforcement would be constant nagging by the device. If the user still doesn't improve his actions, the system would intensify the punishments, like cutting the power supply to a device.

Discussion:

I think that it's indeed a creative and ingenious idea to incorporate the operant theory into the smart appliances. I can see that the positive and negative reinforcement will indeed work. However, the punishments being talked about in the essay kind of cross the limit. It's like the machine is not only telling you and forcing you to do something, but it's also threatening and punishing you if you don't listen to it. I think this would be extremely annoying to most people and that most people will end up either disabling the device or not installing the device altogether.