[1] The effects of this phenomenon on people experiencing these media are often profound, leading them to behave and to respond to these experiences in unexpected ways, most of which they are completely unaware of.
[2] Originally based on the research of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford University, the theory explains that people tend to respond to media as they would either to another person (by being polite, cooperative, attributing personality characteristics such as aggressiveness, humor, expertise, and gender) – or to places and phenomena in the physical world – depending on the cues they receive from the media.
[2] Numerous studies that have evolved from the research in psychology, social science and other fields indicate that this type of reaction is automatic, unavoidable, and happens more often than people realize.
[2] Reeves and Nass designed an experiment with 22 participants and told them they would be working with a computer to learn about random facts of American pop culture.
[2] Reeves and Nass ran the test again but added a voice speaker to both computers that would verbally communicate information to make the human-social theme more explicit.
[1] Johnson and Gardner tested mindlessness as one of the explanations of the media equation theory, and they investigated if different moods will affect participants’ tendency to stereotypes when interacting with computers.
Nevertheless, the finding in female participants shows that mindlessness is more likely to occur when people are in a mindless state because, according to Johnson and Gardner, first, people who are in a happy mood may not feel the need to use their cognitive effort to process the environment; second, people tend to avoid using their cognitive effort when in a happy mood unless doing so can maintain or elevate their good mood; third, negative effect suggests that there may be a threat in the environment which will require more systematic processing but positive effect suggests that the environment may be safe, and thus no need to expand cognitive effort.
The research tested the level of threat to fundamental human needs elicited by the cyberball-paradigm and real-life behavior afterward with a sample of 45 university students.
It indicates that the media equation is valid for immediate response to social exclusion, whereas temporally delayed emotional and behavioral reactions for agents and avatars differ, which might be due to the participants are no longer in a mindless state.
Studies have tested a wide variety of communication characteristics with the media – manners, personality, emotion, social roles and form.
To test this idea with human-computer interaction, researchers designed an experiment in which participants would work with a computer on a tutoring exercise.
[6] In psychology there is a law of hedonic asymmetry that says evaluations of good and bad are important but not the same; negative experiences tend to dominate.
[10] Thus, Nass and Reeves believe that we assign personality traits to phones, computers, and other devices and we get annoyed at Siri when it tells a bad joke.
[12] Similarly, researches found people have a large tolerance for differences in visual fidelity just as in a real setting, because human naturally sees the world under a peripheral vision field.
[13] Lastly, people often pay more attention to moving objects even though they cause no harm in virtual settings, unlike in real life.
[16] In these cases, reciprocity behavior developed in the anthropomorphic module is automatically applied in conversations with virtual social agents.
But, as Nass and Moon (2000)[18] argue, these explanations do not add up to the body of empirical evidence that supports media equation.
When debriefed, they insisted that they would never respond socially to a computer, and vehemently denied the specific behavior they had in fact exhibited during the experiments,” (p. 93).
Critics have also argued that the way the experiments and questionnaires were designed in the Stanford research may have predisposed their subjects to interact socially with technology.
Reeves and Nass argue that quantity is not something social media executed very well; they feel it causes frustration because computers display too much or too little information to humans when trying to communicate.
Reeves and Nass argue that Grice's maxims are vital guidelines to the media equation because violations of these rules have a social significance.
If one side of social interaction violates a rule, it may come off to the other party as a lack of attention being paid, or a diminishing of the importance of the conversation; in other words, they get offended.
In the study which examines the effectiveness of survey bots collecting data in a 3D virtual game, Second Life, researchers found the result both supports and contradict the media equation theory.
The bot and human interview would walk up to avatars in Second Life and cask survey questions using private message chatterboxes.
The result shows the bot and human interviewers are equally successful in collecting real-life information in the virtual setting.
[19] In a study that examines the pupillary responses to robots and human emotions, researchers found results supporting the Uncanny Valley and the media equation theory.
The researchers record the pupil size of 40 participants while they view and rate the pictures of robots and human faces expressing various emotions.
In addition, across various emotional situations, pupil dilation pattern appears to be very similar between robot and human stimuli.
Therefore, a balance needs to be reached when creating digital environments that nurture study habits while stimulating user enthusiasm.
By employing the frequentist and Bayesian statistics, researchers tested the media equation and Computers are Social Actors (CASA) validity.