Persuasion in mobile apps and logical fallacies: A preliminary study

In the last decade the research on persuasive technologies has become an emerging area in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Following this line of studies, in this paper we focus our attention on the persuasion strategies adopted in e-commerce websites and mobile applications. We start from the hypothesis that there is a strong connection between logical fallacies (forms of reasoning which are logically invalid but cognitively effective) and some common persuasion strategies adopted within these technological artifacts. With the aim of empirically evaluating our hypothesis, we carried out a preliminary study on a sample of 101 mobile applications and 175 websites.