Social reactions toward people vs. computers: How mere lables shape interactions [An article from: Computers in Human Behavior]

This digital document is a journal article from Computers in Human Behavior, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
What criteria afford a machine the status of a social agent? In this investigation, the mere label identifying an oral interviewer as human or computer was sufficient to affect participants' responses toward the interviewer during an online interview for a competitive mock job. Participants' impressions of the interviewer and self-reported emotional reactions to the interview were unaffected by the interviewer's identity. Despite this invariance, however, participants exhibited more interpersonal displays when the interviewer was identified as human. Overall, these results show that participants engaged in heightened impression management strategies (deferral to, or attempts to engage or appease) with the ''human'' interviewer. The computer interviewer did not merit equivalent social status.