Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers

Journal of Social Issues, Spring, 2000 by Clifford Nass, Youngme Moon

The results supported the hypothesis that individuals would mindlessly gender-stereotype computers. Both male and female participants found the female-voiced evaluator computer to be significantly less friendly than the male-voiced evaluator, even though the content of their comments was identical. In addition, the generally positive praise from a male-voiced computer was more compelling than the same comments from a female-voiced computer: Participants thought the tutor computer was significantly more competent (and friendlier) when it was praised by a male-voiced computer, compared to when it was praised by a female-voiced computer. And finally, the female-voiced tutor computer was rated as significantly more informative about love and relationships compared to the male-voiced tutor, while the male-voiced tutor was rated as significantly more informative about computers (Nass et al., 1997).

It is important to note that in this experiment, participants were wholly aware that the voice was a narrator for the computer (as opposed to some human "behind" the computer). In addition, they knew that the voice did not necessarily reflect the gender of the computer programmer. In fact, when asked (in postexperimental debriefs), participants indicated that they believed the various computer programs were probably written by the same person, even though different voices were played in the different software programs. And despite their behavior, they also uniformly agreed that male-voiced computers were no different than female-voiced computers and that to engage in gender-stereotyping with respect to computers would be ludicrous.

Ethnicity. The second social category examined was ethnicity (Nass, Isbister, & Lee, in press). In this experiment, an interactive video manipulation [4] was used to provide participants with an "ethnicity cue." And because minority group individuals tend to exhibit much higher levels of ethnic identification (Wilder & Shapiro, 1984), we involved Korean rather than Caucasian participants.

Participants were given a series of hypothetical choice-dilemma situations in which an individual had to decide between two courses of action. In general, one option tended to be more rewarding and attractive but less likely to be attained. (For example, one of the situations described the dilemma of a college football player who could either go for a risky play that could win the game, or go for a cautious play that could tie.)

The participants were instructed to read a description of the situation, make a decision, and then ask the computer agent--represented by a Korean or Caucasian video face--what decision it would make. After being presented with the agent's decision and its arguments in favor of that decision, the participants answered a series of questions (using a paper-and-pencil questionnaire) concerning their perception of the agent's decision, the quality of the agent's argument, and their own decision. This procedure was repeated for eight different choice-dilemma situations.