Personalized Persuasion by Shaping Beliefs About the Multidimensional Features of Objects

Personalization consistently improves the impact of persuasive agents, recommender systems, and nudge interventions. However, most implementations still rely on coarse-grained demographic or personality attributes such as age, gender, or broad personality traits. Ultimate personalization instead tailors messages to an individual’s nuanced beliefs and utilities. Multi-attribute utility theory formalizes personal utility as the sum of utilities over an object’s features, highlighting that negative beliefs about even a few features can suppress overall acceptance. Leveraging multi-attribute utility theory, we test whether countering the features each individual values least can raise acceptance of a complex technology—fully autonomous vehicles. For each participant (N = 197), a belief-manipulation algorithm identified the five fully autonomous vehicle features with the lowest subjective utilities and generated counter-propositions during a semi-structured dialogue with a virtual agent. Pre- and post-dialogue measures captured (i) monetary valuation of fully autonomous vehicles, (ii) desire to ride, and (iii) perceived social obligation to accept fully autonomous vehicles. Two comparison conditions served as controls: a non-personalized counter-argument condition and a baseline small-talk condition in which the agent discussed everyday topics unrelated to autonomous vehicles. The results showed that the proposed method improved the social obligation to accept fully autonomous vehicles more than the non-personalized method and the baseline method, but had no effect on the monetary value and the desire to ride them. This suggests that personalized belief manipulation may not be effective in enhancing the “want to” desire or utility of an object, but may only improve the thought of “ought to do”. These findings have broad implications for understanding belief manipulation across diverse domains where acceptance involves complex cognitive and motivational processes, including healthcare decision-making, educational engagement, and sustainable behavior adoption.