A word of advice: how to tailor motivational text messages based on behavior change theory to personality and gender

Developing systems that motivate people to change their behaviors, such as an exercise application for the smartphone, is challenging. One solution is to implement motivational strategies from existing behavior change theory and tailor these strategies to preferences based on personal characteristics, like personality and gender. We operationalized strategies by collecting representative motivational text messages and aligning the messages to ten theory-based behavior change strategies. We conducted an online survey with 350 participants, where the participants rated 50 of our text messages (each aligned to one of the ten strategies) on how motivating they found them. Results show that differences in personality and gender relate to significant differences in the evaluations of nine out of ten strategies. Eight out of ten strategies were perceived as either more or less motivating in relation to scores on the personality traits Openness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness. Four strategies were perceived as more motivating by men than by women. These findings show that personality and gender influence how motivational strategies are perceived. We conclude that our theory-based behavior change strategies can be more motivating by tailoring them to personality and gender of users of behavior change systems.