Book Reading #48 - Media Equation

Part 1
Title: Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon
Venue: Journal of Societal Issues, Vol. 56-1, 2000
Summary:
This paper discusses the way humans approach computers and often view them as social entities. This paper talked about how we assume human-human interaction because of the mindless response that machines show.  Tests were done to show that that people often associated gender, ethnicity, and things like aggressiveness to computers even when every single participant said that a computer should not be interacted with as another human.

Part 2
Title: Computers are Social Actors
Authors: Clifford Nass, Jonathon Steuer, Ellen R. Tauber
Venue: CHI '94, April 1994
Summary:
This paper shows what kind of norms people apply towards computers and how easily these responses can be generated during interaction. All of the studies showed that primitive cues are powerful such as gender and voice. The overall results show that the human-computer relationship is fundamentally social.

Part 3
Title: Can Computer Personalities Be Human Personalities?
Authors: Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon, BJ Fogg, Byron Reeves, Chris Dryer
Venue: CHI '95, May 7-11 1995
Summary:
This part briefly described how a computer can have a personality that can easily be created by using minimal cues. It also describes how people respond socially to these personalities. The personalities studied were dominance and submissive. The study showed  that people recognized that the computers had personalities and that they preferred working with a computer that had shared the same dominance or submission. The study paired a computer and person together and had them problem solve together. Simple predetermined aspects were given to the programs to make them dominant or submissive. Dominant computers always went first, used strong language, and expressed a high confidence level. Submissive computers used a lot of questions, displayed low confidence, and always went second.

Discussion: 
These paper shows that people can recognize artificial personalities given to computers. Cues such as gender, race, and general attitude are recognized by users and things such as voice are very powerful. This is important to think about in design because this is another aspect to be considered when thinking about how a user will view an interface and interact with it.