Media Equation

Reference Information:
Title: Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon

Title: Computers are Social Actors
Authors: Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, and Ellen R. Tauber

Title: Can computer personalities be human personalities
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon, B. J. Fogg, Byron Reeves, D. Christopher Dryer

Summary:
These readings discuss how humans treat computers like human beings even though they are conscious that computers are not humans and treating them that way is ridiculous. They first discuss and refute two theories as to why this is the case. The first theory is that they are humanizing the computer, but this is proven not to be the case as the people admitted beforehand that computers had no humanity at all. The second theory is that people are reacting to the computers programmer, which was also thought not to be the case as they had no relation to the programmer at all. The experiments used to test the social treatments of computers involved giving computers gender voices, evaluating computers in the same and different room as the computer being evaluated, and associating the computer as a team with the person or individualizing the two. They found that people responded to gender in the same ways they would with a human, were polite and scored the computer higher when it was in the room, and liked the computer more if it was on their team. In order to test the use of this social treatment an additional study used a dominant computer, named Max, and a passive one, named Linus, to ask users questions and then see how confident they were in their answers. They found that users were far more confident in their answers when using Max as apposed to using Linus. Therefore the papers all agreed that people treat computers as human agents in regards to social responses.

Discussion:
 I found these papers absolutely fascinating. I believe that it makes sense that since a computer is perceived to some extent to be intelligent, that people would treat them with some human social responses. The knowledge of this information can have a huge impact on human-computer interaction. With the right amount of testing people could find ways to solicit desired human responses towards their program. From a business standpoint, making humans feel loyal to a program must have some financial benefits. In summation, this is most likely the most interesting fact about computers that I have learned in this class and I am very glad that I was able to read it.