It's Not Just About the Product: How Persuasive Communication Affects the Disclosure of Personal Health Information

Abstract

Individuals' disclosure of personal health information (PHI) can hold substantial benefits for both users and providers, but users are often reluctant to disclose, even if they gain benefits such as better personalization. While previous research has dealt with message framing and information quality in a health-related context, these factors have been observed separately. To our best knowledge, we are among the first to have examined both factors (attribute framing and argument strength) and their interactions concerning PHI disclosure. Thus, we conducted a web-based experiment with 529 participants to examine the impacts of two persuasive message techniques (attribute framing and argument strength) on individuals' PHI disclosure. We reveal that individuals tend to disclose more PHI when they experience persuasive messages with more positively framed health wearable (HW) attributes or messages with higher argument strength based on the reasons for the data collection. We enable researchers to uncover the impacts of persuasive messages in highly sensitive data environments and provide practitioners with workable suggestions on how to affect individuals' PHI disclosure behaviors.