I’d Like to Introduce You to My Desktop: Toward a Theory of Social Human-Computer Interaction

Entire industries have grown up around the physiological, cognitive, and economic demands of technology on users, but there is little research into the specific psychological processes and implications of the social function of human-computer interaction (HCI), especially when the computer is programmed to mimic human norms. To understand this issue better, it is necessary to find the limits of what HCI with social capacity means. The Computers are Social Actors paradigm, or CASA (Reeves & Nass, 1996) began this exploration. We begin by replicating aspects of a study on acts of reciprocity toward a computer (Fogg 1997), then we consider the role of agreeableness in the number of favors a human performs for a computer. Finally, we examine individual differences in styles of altruism and if a strange computer is treated similarly to an unknown human. We hypothesize a) that a helpful computer elicits more favors than an unhelpful computer, b) that high agreeable people are more generous to a software agent than low agreeable people, and c) that a positive correlation exists between the number of favors performed for a computer and an individual’s trait of reciprocal altruism. Data analysis of 54 participants shows that the helpfulness of the computer is not significantly correlated to the number of favors performed for it, that agreeableness has a negative correlation to number of favors performed when the computer is helpful, and that reciprocal altruism is negatively correlated to the number of favors performed for a computer. A discussion of the possible limitations and implications of the research follows.