Personalized interventions

Abstract

Personality science appears to be entering a new era centered on personalized interventions. These are designed by initiators so as to align intervention features with characteristics of the targeted recipient, with the aim of increasing intervention effectiveness. The recent rapid and widespread adoption of personalized interventions has been largely driven by technological advancements that facilitate the collection and inference of individual-level information (e.g., via passively collected or automatically generated data), as well as the development (e.g., through AI-based conversational agents) and large-scale dissemination (e.g., via push notifications) of personalized interventions. Herein, we provide a brief overview of current knowledge on personalized psychological interventions, highlighting key conceptual, empirical, and ethical aspects. Conceptually, researchers and practitioners might adapt features concerning the intervention initiator, the targeted recipient, the message, and/or the context of delivery. Empirically, personalized interventions have shown effectiveness across domains such as consumer marketing, education, financial behavior, health, and politics. Ethically, concerns remain—particularly regarding the reliability and validity of inferred characteristics from digital trace data, and the extent to which individuals can provide truly informed consent. Expecting that research on personalized interventions will do nothing but grow substantially in the coming years, we conclude with a call to design, conduct, and report studies in ways that support the accumulation of theoretically grounded and reliable knowledge.