The Media Equation is a general communication theory that claims people tend to assign human characteristics to computers and other media, and treat them as if they were real social actors. 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.
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. 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. Reeves and Nass (1996) argue that, “Individuals’ interactions with computers, television, and new media are fundamentally social and natural, just like interactions in real life,” (p. 5).
The Media Equation Test (1996) Reeves and Nass established two rules before the test- when a computer asks a user about itself, the user will give more positive responses than when a different computer asks the same question. They expected people to be less variable with their responses when they took a test and then answered a questionnaire on the same computer. They wanted to see that computers, although not human, can implement social responses. The independent variable was the computer (there are two in the test), and the dependent variable was the evaluation responses, and the control was a pen-and-paper questionnaire.
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. At the end of the session they would ask the participants to evaluate the computer that they used. They would have to tell Reeves and Nass how they felt about that computer and how well it performed. 20 facts were presented in each session, and participants would answer if they knew “a great deal, somewhat, or very little” about the statement. After the session, participants were tested on the material and told which questions they had answered correctly or incorrectly. Computer #1, then made a statement of its own performance by always stating that it “did a good job”.
Participants were then divided into 2 groups to evaluate the computer's performance and participants were asked to describe this performance from the choice of about 20 adjectives. Half of the participants were assigned to evaluate on computer #1, the computer that praised its own work. The other half were sent to another computer across the room to evaluate computer#1's performance.
The conclusion resulted in evaluations done on computer #1 after testing on computer #1 yielded much more positive responses about the session. Evaluations completed on the other computer after testing on computer #1 resulted in much more varied and more negative responses about the session. For the control, the pen-and-paper questionnaire, the evaluations had similar results to that of evaluations done on computer #2. Participants felt more comfortable being honest when a different computer or pen-and-paper questionnaire asked about the sessions completed on computer #1. It is as if participants were talking behind the computer #1's back- not being honest to it, but then expressing more honesty to a third party evaluator. Reeves and Nass found that participants had automatic social reactions during the test.
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. The test resulted in almost exactly the same results. They concluded that people are polite to computers in both verbal and textual scenarios. The participants did not need much of a cue to respond socially to the computers. The experiment supports the hypothesis that social rules can apply to media, and computers can be social initiators. Participants denied being intentionally polite to the computer, but the results suggest differently.
Propositions
The media equation relies on eight propositions derived from the research: