Humans have been communicating with other humans via text for ages. Fooling a human that the person on the other side of text communication is also a human isn't too hard, especially when they are not looking for signs of deception.
Even if they are aware it is a computer, humans will anthropomorphize literally anything. Animals are obvious, but we'll even extent it to simple objects like cars. We'll talk to them with zero expectation of any response or sign of sentience. It's a suspension of disbelief, really. It's not any different than kids playing Cops And Robbers, people performing a theatre play, or playing a board game with friends.
CASA seems to suggest that humans will view any computer interaction as one between two humans. That's not just interacting with chat bots, that's also something like opening the Configuration Panel. If you ask me, that's a massive stretch!
I don’t remember people interacting with computers as if they are human in the 1990s — at least the people who actually did interact with computers on a regular basis.
You:
CASA doesn't postulate that users in the 90s interacted with computers as if they were literally other humans.
The article:
The Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) theory is the most important theoretical contribution that has shaped the field of human–computer interaction. The theory states that humans interact with computers as if they are human, and is the cornerstone on which all social human–machine communication (e.g., chatbots, robots, virtual agents) are designed. However, the theory itself dates back to the early 1990s, and, since then, technology and its place in society has evolved and changed drastically.
Me:
Confused.
Most in this cohort grew up with many kinds of electronic device. This includes kid-focused, hand-held games like a "speak and spell" or a "simon says" game and other toys that played recorded voices. Video game arcades and home video games were common and games were full of sequential prompting and story telling. But I think we saw these as conduits for content, not defaulting to any belief that there was agency in the device.
There were also portable radios and tape players, so we were used to technology delivering social content. Also, there were plenty of digital controls on home appliances as mentioned previously. Microwave ovens, washing machines, CD players, programmable VCRs, programmed irrigation timers, etc. These were all things that had some level of automated and asynchronous behavior.
I remember one of my older relatives back in the 1980s liked to jokingly quote a theory about "the perversity of inanimate objects" that he had picked up as a technician in the US Navy. And yet we would have raised an eyebrow if anybody really responded to devices as social actors. It would be as strange as if someone talked to plants or to their shoes.
Do you have evidence of that, or are you saying it looks the same?
The replication crisis on HN is replication of these comments in every discussion of social science research. The papers that they tried to replicate at least were at least based on evidence, and the conclusion was not that they were completely wrong but that, for many papers (not all by any measure), the conclusion was replicated but the evidence wasn't quite as strong as in the original.
1) The behavior of people has changed substantively since the first study. (Which is what the present study seems to be concluding.)
2) At least one of the studies wasn’t representative and/or didn’t actually measure what it claimed to measure. (That is, an exhibit of the replication crisis.)
What I’m saying is that explanation 2 seems much more plausible to me, given that the results of the first study don’t match my recollection and experience at all.
> the results of the first study don’t match my recollection and experience at all.
30 years ago you had some anecdotal impressions. 30 years ago the researchers had a hypothesis, focused on this exact question, designed an experiment, and collected evidence. (And many since have found it valid.) 30 years later, we have a detailed written report of their experience, and your 30-year old memory as posted on HN.
It's just too easy to say, 'that's not my experience' without evidence. Everything is 'debunked' on that basis. Now we have 30 year old memories too.
If you mean that yours and/or layer8's perspectives are a 'real thing', you don't have a privileged claim on reality, of course (and neither do I).
Yeah. In the article we can find that "the original study recruited 30 Stanford University undergraduates (10 in each of the original 3 conditions, see Procedure)."
I wouldn't think twice before throwing away the results and forgetting about them.
The replication study does better, recruiting 132 participants. This is much harder to ignore.
This is more believable than the way most people are interpreting it but I still have doubts. I was an adult in that era, and what I remember is computers were just so much more mechanical then. It was more like operating a microwave oven than today's much more sophisticated machines. It's hard to imagine those simple error codes triggering human social reactions.
I'm not sure the key change over time here is the about "emergent technology". My observation is that, as computers were increasingly networked (particularly after the explosion of the Internet), perception of computers shifted much more to being a communication tool... and that's now literally true as the primary computer people interact with is their phone. Even before smartphones, once the networking became ubiquitous things started changing. Email was initially the primary use for networked computers, and then with the web they became tools to interact with remote people/organizations, and with the explosion of social media they became tools primarily for interacting with other people. Before networking, the person at the other end of the conversation was just so much more removed/abstract, so most people's mental models were left with only the device itself in the interaction.