Abstract
This paper studies Kairos, i.e. the opportune moment to persuade, through a smoking cessation experiment. We approached 101 people, comprising of 81 smokers and 20 non-smokers, on the streets of Palo Alto, California. The participants were shown five warning pictures related to the dangers of smoking as well as a control picture. The people rated each picture based upon how strongly they felt they were affected by the pictures. The results indicate that the opportune moment to show these pictures is not when the people already are smoking but rather much earlier. Quite interestingly, the affect of this intervention was stronger on women than men. The fact that the opportune moment seems to vary between individuals complicates the design of applications leveraging Kairos to a great extent.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ajzen, I.: From intentions to actions: A theory of planned behavior. In: Kuhl, J., Beckman, J. (eds.) Action-control: From cognition to behavior, pp. 11–39. Springer, Heidelberg (1985)
Fogg, B.J.: Persuasive Technology. Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco (2003)
Kinneavy, J.L.: Kairos: A neglected concept in classical rhetoric. In: Moss, J.D. (ed.) Rhetoric and praxis: The contribution of classical rhetoric to practical reasoning, pp. 79–105. The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, DC (1986)
Kinneavy, J.L., Eskin, C.R.: Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Written Communication 17(3), 432–444 (2000)
Oinas-Kukkonen, H.: The 7C Model for Organizational Knowledge Sharing, Learning and Management. In: Proceedings of the Fifth European Conference on Organizational Knowledge, Learning and Capabilities (OKLC 2004), Innsbruck, Austria, April 2-3 (2004)
Webster, C.: Tobacco Smoking Addiction: A Challenge to the National Health Service. Addiction 79(1), 7–16 (1984)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Räisänen, T., Oinas-Kukkonen, H., Pahnila, S. (2008). Finding Kairos in Quitting Smoking: Smokers’ Perceptions of Warning Pictures. In: Oinas-Kukkonen, H., Hasle, P., Harjumaa, M., Segerståhl, K., Øhrstrøm, P. (eds) Persuasive Technology. PERSUASIVE 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5033. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68504-3_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68504-3_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68500-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68504-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)