团队

Many mobile applications use push notifications and reminders to explicitly educate, remind, and motivate users to perform healthy behaviors. However, users do not always act according to these explicit digital interventions. Our study investigates whether users’ self-regulation can be implicitly facilitated with a proper mobile interaction design. Specifically, we investigate the impacts of two touch modes that are supported by force-based interaction technology, that is, pressing and tapping. Drawing on the theory of embodied cognition, which suggests that people automatically infer meanings from their bodily actions, we conjecture that pressing, compared with tapping, enhances self-regulation because the action of pressing on the touchscreen embodies resolute approach motivation toward goals. We test our hypotheses in three experiments. The first experiment investigates beverage choices on a mobile app; the second experiment examines goal setting on a fitness app; and the third experiment focuses on personal hygiene learning on a mobile education app. The results from the three experiments show that pressing actions can improve users’ self-regulation in selecting a healthier but less tasty beverage (Study 1), setting higher exercise goals and performing more physical exercise (Study 2), and reducing lapses in maintaining personal hygiene (Study 3). In addition, such effects were more salient among users with a higher level of health knowledge and a promotion-focused health orientation. This study contributes to healthcare IT research by showing that mobile interaction can be leveraged to nudge users toward enhanced self-regulation.

人们的生活作息规律是由生理时钟和社交时钟共同构建而成。不过，人们的社交时钟经常偏离生理时钟（例如：为了工作或学习，比睡到自然醒早起；为了夜班工作或赶上项目完成期限而熬夜）— 此现象被称为「社交时差」。社交时差如何影响消费者行为？研究的工作数据和实验结果显示，由于处于社交时差的消费者往往对社交互动不太感兴趣，因此社交时差会减少炫耀性的消费行为。然而，此效应在以下情况会有所减弱：当消费者与熟悉的人而非陌生人进行社交互动；当他们的炫耀性消费行为不会引起社交圈子的关注；以及当他们倾向于私人场合中使用奢侈品。