Computers Are Human, Too

Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, two professors at Stanford University, study people's responses to computers. By cleverly repurposing classic experiments in social psychology, they observed some remarkable behavior. They have published their findings in a book entitled The Media Equation.^[2] They have demonstrated conclusively that humans react to computers in the same way that they react to other humans.

^[2] Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, The Media Equation; How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 1-57586-052-X.

Nass and Reeves say that "people are not evolved to twentieth-century technology," and that "modern media now engage old brains…. Consequently, any medium that is close enough will get human treatment, even though people know it's foolish and even though they likely will deny it afterward." To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people, even when we "believe it is not reasonable to do so."

In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive friction, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being. This reaction is unconscious and unavoidable, and it applies to everyone. With deep and amusing irony, Nass and Reeves used as test subjects many computer-science grad students skilled enough to have coded up the test programs themselves. These subjects were highly educated, mature, and rational individuals, and they all strongly denied being emotionally affected by cognitive friction, even though the objective evidence was incontrovertible.

Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker corroborates this thesis in his remarkable book, How the Mind Works. He says, "People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being but were adaptive in that environment."^[3]

^[3] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997, ISBN 0-393-04535-8. I absolutely love this wonderful, eye-opening, literate, amusing, readable book.