To inspire some thinking about illusion, I read The Media Equation by Reeves and Nass. While the numerous concepts are engaging and informative overall, moving through an excess of lab scenario details is semi-tedious. The authors set out to demonstrate that people respond to TV, computers, and new media, in essentially the same ways that they respond to real life. The book offers thoughts around a multitude of psychological experiments, which are all based on a relatively simple 7-step method (i.e. take an example of how humans interact socially in their natural environment and then substitute in a computer or interface in order to test for the similarities or differences that occur). Reeves and Nass predict rules in each case, and their results are pretty convincing, but many of the conclusions they imply rely on stereotypes and social norms that would hopefully evolve over time.
Each chapter provides at least one lesson. Topics include:
- media and manners (politeness, distance, flattery, judgment)
- media and personality (characters, interfaces, imitation)
- media and emotion (good/bad, negativity, arousal)
- media and social roles (specialists, teammates, gender, voices, orientation source)
- media and form (size, fidelity, synchrony, motion, cuts/scene changes, subliminal)
Most of what I’ve taken from the text is about social norms or patterns and the automatic responses many of us have to a wide range of stimuli. In other words, the book could solely be a social sciences analysis if the authors decided to drop the computer/media component. This component mainly wraps the range of findings into the single idea that we may think of hardware/software and media as inanimate, but by and large, we treat them as if they were living, breathing things, both social and natural. This is the key point in connecting the title to illusion.
The most surprising segment of the book for me related to flattery, specifically on p55: “Whether praise is warranted or not will have no effect on what people think about the praising computer.” I’m skeptical because it seems illogical that subjects would disregard or feel unfavorably toward the computer (or person) giving unwarranted praise, but the tests show otherwise. This finding may play out in real life, but it seems the flatterer would risk losing integrity. A lesson though is that positive feedback is generally lacking in both real life and software interfaces. Maybe this is obvious, but it would be wise to move towards a flattering approach for increased likability of our work and selves. Further along on p101, Reeves and Nass introduce “gain theory,” which relates to preference when a subject changes to imitate or respond favorably to a user. The Pollyana Effect p120, the cumulative nature of arousal p137, and continued themes about attention/focus, and memory, were also especially interesting.