Reeves and Nass gathered their research findings and published a book called: ”The media equation”
(Reeves & Nass, 1996). In this book, they point out that people respond to computers as they were living beings, and these responses to certain types of computing systems are fundamentally social; human beings are hardwired to respond to cues in the environment, especially to things that seem alive in some way. By providing social cues in human-computer interface, users can sense the social intention and take the computer as a social actor, and this interaction comes into being human-human-like interactive relationship. Thus, Nass purposed the aspect of “computers as social actors” (CASA) to characterize this phenomenon.
Following the psychoanalyst Langer’s explanation of mindlessness (Langer, 1992), Nass and Moon conducted a serious of experimental studies to demonstrate the “Mindless response to computers”, a perspective for the reason that why people act socially with computers (Nass & Moon, 2000). The studies have argued and ruled out the possibilities of “anthropomorphism”, “orientation to the programmer” and “characterizing computers” by evidences from experiments. Instead, they point out that “individuals mindlessly apply social rules and expectations to computers”. In details, it includes three reasons: (1) Individuals overuse human social
categories, applying gender stereotypes to computers and ethnically identifying with computer agents. (2) People exhibit overlearned social behaviors such as politeness and reciprocity toward computers. (3) People tend to apply premature cognitive commitments due to their former experiences and impressions.
2.3.1 Social presence
“Presence” was first used as “telepresence” by Minsky (1980) to explain the sense of presence from users providing in communication technology. It has become a term for discussing sense presented and conveyed by mediums. Lombard and Ditton (Lombard and Ditton, 1997) defined presence as “the perceptual illusion of nonmediation”. The term “perceptual” means that presence “… involves continuous (real time) responses of the human sensory, cognitive, and affective processing systems to objects and entities in a person’s environment”. By “illusion of nonmediation,” they refer to a phenomenon in which“… a person fails to
perceive or acknowledge the existence of a medium in his or her communication environment and responds as he or she would if the medium were not there”.
Physical presence and social presence are two dimensions of presence. Physical presence, the extent to which people feel that they are in a virtual world, is exhibited from medium, such as the presentation form virtual reality. Social presence, the sense that other intelligent beings coexist and interact with us, reflects the social connection or approaching. In advance, Lombard concluded presence in six types: (1) presence as social richness, (2) presence as realism, (3) presence as transportation, (4) presence as immersion, (5) presence as social actors within medium, (6) presence as medium as social actors. “Presence as social actors within medium”, means that actors or virtual actors in medium induce audiences or users to act as unconsciously socially interaction to them. In “presence as medium as social actors”, it means audiences or users exhibit human –human interaction pattern via application of language, real-time interaction and social norms. This type of researches, focusing on the presenting social sense in interaction between people and product or people and system, mainly addressed in “computer are social actors” by Nass. These studies discuss about the human-computer interface in computing medium exhibiting verbal feedback, rich interaction and social role.
After perceiving social cues, users tempt to be induced naturally social feedback. Our study here is to discuss about the social presence, exhibiting by computing product, which is as a medium, throughout interactive experience linking with social aspect.
2.3.2 Computers as Persuasive Social Actors
In the book “Persuasive Technology” (Fogg, 2002), Fogg has proposed five primary types of social cues being able to cause people to make inferences about social presence in a computing product: Physical, Psychological, Language, Social dynamics, Social roles (table 2.1). These social cues may provide positive feedback and emotional support.
We take these five cues as basic guide line for us to observe what social attribute of a clerk may attract people, and base on this, it is much easier to reconstruct what kind of effect that social motion cues may induce.
Table 2. 1 Primary Types of Social Cues, purposed from Persuasive Technology. (Fogg, 2002)
Cue Example
s
Physical Face, eyes, body, movement
Psychological Preferences, humor, personality, feelings, empathy, “I’m sorry”
Language Interactive language use, spoken language, language recognition
Social dynamics Turn taking, cooperation, praise for good work, answering questions, reciprocity
Social roles Doctor, teammate, opponent, teacher, pet, guide
2.3.3 Five Types of Social Cues
The fact that people respond socially to computational products has significant implications for persuasion.
It shows the possibility for applying a host of persuasion dynamics that are collectively described as social influence – the influence type that arises from social situations. “When perceived as social actors, computer products can leverage these principles of social influence to motivate and persuade users” (Fogg, 2002.)
(1) Persuasion through Physical Cues
One way a computing technology can convey social presence is through physical characteristics, such as eyes, mouth, movement, and other physical attributes. Furthermore, physical attractiveness
plays an important role; since a more attractive technology (interface or hardware) will have greater persuasive power than an unattractive technology.
(2) Persuasion through Psychological Cues
Psychological cues from a computing product can lead people to infer, often subconsciously, that a product has emotions, preferences, motivations, and personality, in short, the computer is a psychological. The psychological cues can be simple, such as text messages that convey empathy (“I’m sorry, but…”) or onscreen icons that portray emotion, such as the smiling face of the early Macintosh computer. Or cues can be more complex, such as those that convey personality. Such complex cues may become apparent only after the user interacts with technology for a period of time.
(3) Persuasion through Language
Computing products also can use written or spoken language (“You’ve got mail!”) to convey social presence and to persuade. Dialogue boxes are a common example of the persuasive use of language. One of the most powerful persuasive uses of language is to offer praise.
(4) Persuasion through Social Dynamics
Most cultures have set patterns for how people interact with each other- rituals for meeting people, taking turns, forming lines, and many others. These rituals are social dynamics – unwritten rules for interacting with others. Computing technology can also apply social dynamics to convey social presence and to persuade. Some social dynamics can show in dialogue or text.
(5) Persuasion through Adopting Social Roles
Applying powerful and influential social role can be persuasive, such as an authority. Consider the roles of “friend”, “entertainer” and “opponent”, each of which can cause people to change their attitudes or behavior and these will be other influence strategies that don’t leverage power or status but also can
be effective. For computers that play social roles to be effective in motivating or persuading, it is important to choose the role model carefully or it will be counterproductive. Knowing target audience is important for designers to incorporate social roles.
Although people respond socially to computer products that convey social cues, to be more effective in persuasion, designers must understand the appropriate use of those cues. In general, Dr. Fogg believes it is much more appropriate to enhance social cues in leisure, entertainment, and educational products (e.g., smart toys, video games, kids’ learning applications). Users of such applications are more likely to indulge, accept, and perhaps even embrace an explicit cyber social actor— either embodied or not.
By applying social roles, people who work in sales, advertising, and other high-persuasion areas know the key attributes of persuasive, and they do what they can to be attractive. Therefore, our approach to the new vending machine which may attract people more as a result, will be finding a social role as a paradigm for our first step, which has to be taken as a survey before design activity.
2.3.4 Relevant CASA Studies
Besides proceeding in improvement of technology, researchers focus on retrieve the value of human-human interaction so that can be the insight in applying more social and more appropriate attributes appreciated by people.
In order to enable more natural and life-like human-robot interactions, Breazeal purposed a guide line for how the social nature of the robot is expressed was taken from social literature on human social interaction (Breazeal, 2003).
Applying social norm on HCI design is able to eliminate sources of frustration and provide emotional and empathetic support. For instance, Klein and his team’s research results indicate that a designed HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) agent was able to support users in their ability to recover from negative emotional states, particularly frustration. The agent uses social-affective feedback strategies delivered to the user with text-only interaction (Klein, et. al., 1999).
Providing voice feedback on HCI can also induce social presence. Qvarfordt discusses about the influence from designed voice feedback to users’ experience. Their research indicates that the more humanlike the spoken feedback is the more participants preferred the system to be human-like. (Qvarfordt, et. al., 2003)
Another related issue is the impact of autonomy on the social role of an intelligent robotic product. The degree and type of autonomy these products can exhibit will shape their interactions with people greatly. The interactions can range, for example, from: (1) People do all the work (e.g. interacting with a toy like Furby) (Furby, 1998) (2) People team with robotic products to accomplish tasks. (e.g., robots designed to help elders remain independent in their homes (Montemerlo et al, 2002). (3) Products providing simple social response to human interaction (e.g., Kismet, a socially aware research prototype) (Breazeal, 2003). (4) A fully reciprocally social robot. Researchers examined issues related to the design and development of social robots that act autonomously — that is, on behalf of humans without continuous input from humans. A forum for researchers in a variety of disciplines is needed to discuss issues related to the interactions between humans and social robots.
In point (3)’s situation, it is close to what human-social product interaction we want to deal with. But the response that we provide is social motion cues. In these different contact and relationship between human and robots, of course, would come out with various specific problems requiring more studies to deal with and raise a number of design challenges. In many kinds of robots, personal service robots have the highest expected growth rate. They assist people directly in domestic and institutional settings. Robots that work with people is defined as social robot - an autonomous or semi-autonomous robot that interacts and communicates with humans by following the behavioral norms expected by the people with whom the robot is intended to interact.