"How Powerful Is Social Identity?
Affiliation Effects in Human-Computer Interaction"
This study manipulates social identity in an interaction between a human and a computer. Although subjects in the two conditions (team and individual) interacted with computers that presented identical content, they responded differently to the interaction: Team subjects displayed more "group-like" responses than individual subjects. Specifically, team subjects saw themselves as more similar to the computer, saw themselves as more cooperative, were more open to influence, thought the computer's information was of higher quality, found the computer's information to be friendlier, and conformed more to the computer's information than did individual subjects. Therefore, social identity is so powerful that it can have a significant effect even in human-computer interaction.
go to paper
go back to list of papers
Last updated on 23 APRIL 1995 by isbister@leland.stanford.edu