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Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass have proposed “The Media Equation”, where media equal real life. They found that individuals’ interactions with computers, televisions, and new media are fundamentally social and natural, just like interactions in real life.

The LAPDP will perform two experiments involving the Media Equation:

EXPERIMENT 1: Politeness

This experiment is based on the following social rule: People are polite to those who ask questions about themselves.

The experiments tested the following two rules:
Rule 1: When a computer asks a user about itself; the user will give more positive responses than when a different computer asks the same questions.
Rule 2: Because people are less honest when a computer asks about itself, the answers will be more homogeneous than when a different computer asks the same questions.

We plan to investigate when a person considers a computer the same computer or a different one. This first experiment will study if the input device enough to affect the results.

EXPERIMENT 2: Personality

The media equation position on personality is that humans can attach personality on objects. In this experiment we will test the ability of the participants to detect personality from simple non-human cartoon drawings.

The participant will be shown a series of 16 simple, color line drawings of cartoons. The drawings will consist of animals and objects. Each figure will display facial characteristics. The subjects will be asked to organize the pictures based on similarities. They will cluster the drawings twice:

• No limit in number of groups, label groups.
• Limit in number of groups, label groups.

The common denominator of the clusters will tell us if the subjects attached personality or emotional meaning to the drawings.

Participants:

Walky Rivadeneira, Ph.D. Student, Department of Psychology
Melissa Tortoriello, Undergraduate Psychology Student

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