Persuasion and Behavioural Exploitation

Definition

Persuasion and Behavioural Exploitation examines testing when personalised persuasion exploits cognitive, emotional or situational vulnerability within the broader domain of covert, deceptive or exploitative attempts to shape beliefs, behaviour, attention or collective action.

Why this matters

Persuasion and Behavioural Exploitation can materially affect autonomy, safety, public trust, market integrity, community cohesion and institutional decisions. Poorly designed interventions can suppress legitimate speech, entrench bias or create false confidence.

Research questions

Under which conditions can testing when personalised persuasion exploits cognitive, emotional or situational vulnerability be measured or improved reliably, and how do effects vary by platform, population, context and intervention?

Hypotheses

A transparent, context-aware approach combining provenance, behavioural evidence and accountable human review will improve behavioural effect, autonomy and informed choice more than single-score, content-only or opaque automated approaches.

Proposed methods

coordinated-behaviour analysis; graph analytics; campaign reconstruction; synthetic-media forensics; controlled persuasion experiments; red-team exercises; threat intelligence; expert review; affected-user interviews; reproducibility testing; methods adapted specifically to Persuasion and Behavioural Exploitation

Stakeholders and beneficiaries

election authorities; civil society; platforms; journalists; security researchers; public agencies; brands; communities; targeted populations