Books
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The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Computers Can Teach Us About Human Relationships. By Clifford Nass with Corina Yen (2010) |
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The driver was insistent: "A woman should not be giving directions." Despite the customer service rep's reassurance that the navigation system in his car wasn't actually a woman-just a computer with a female voice-the driver (and many others like him) refused to listen. There was only one person for BMW to call for help: Clifford Nass, one of the world's leading experts on how people interact with technology. After two decades of studying problems like BMW's GPS system, Microsoft's Clippy (the most reviled animated character of all time), and online evaluations that lead people to lie to their laptops, Nass has developed a powerful theory: Our brains can't fundamentally distinguish between interacting with people and interacting with devices. We will "protect" a computer's feelings, feel flattered by a brown-nosing piece of software, and even do favors for technology that has been "nice" to us. All without even realizing it. In his research at Stanford, Nass has leveraged our fundamentally social relationship with computers to develop and test a series of essential rules for effective human relationships. He has found that the most powerful strategies for working with people aren't really that complicated, and can be learned from watching what succeeds and fails in technology interfaces. In other words, if a computer can make friends, build teams, and calm powerful emotions, so can any of us. Nass's studies reveal many surprising conclusions, such as:
Nass's discoveries push the boundaries of both psychology and technology and provide nothing less than a new blueprint for successful human relationships.
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Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship By Clifford Nass and Scott Brave (2005) Winner, 2007 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award for 2005-2006. |
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Interfaces that talk and listen are populating computers, cars, call centers, and even home appliances and toys, but voice interfaces invariably frustrate rather than help. In Wired for Speech, Clifford Nass and Scott Brave reveal how interactive voice technologies can readily and effectively tap into the automatic responses all speech--whether from human or machine--evokes. Wired for Speech demonstrates that people are "voice-activated": we respond to voice technologies as we respond to actual people and behave as we would in any social situation. By leveraging this powerful finding, voice interfaces can truly emerge as the next frontier for efficient, user-friendly technology. Wired for Speech presents new theories and experiments and applies them to critical issues concerning how people interact with technology-based voices.
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The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. By Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass (1996) |
In an extraordinary revision of received wisdom, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass demonstrate convincingly in The Media Equation that interactions with computers, television and new communication technologies are identical to real social relationships and to the navigation of real physical spaces. The authors present the results of numerous psychological studies showing: that people are polite to computers; that they treat computers with female voices differently than male-voiced computers; that large faces on a screen can invade a person's body space; and that motion on a screen affects physical responses in the same way that real life motion does. One of their startling conclusions is that the human brain has not evolved quikly enough to assimilate twentieth century technology. The authors detail how this knowledge can help us better design and evaluate media technologies, including computer and internet software, television entertainment, advertising, and multimedia. |
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