The short answer is: yes. The medium answer is: media = real life The longer answer is there's an interesting an influential bit of scientific work that might

The short answer is: yes. The medium answer is: media = real life The longer answer is there's an interesting an influential bit of scientific work that might shed some light on this issue, and incidentally, it is also not mentioned in the stackexchange link above. The book is "The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places." by Byron Reeves [0]. The follow-up work to this is found in "The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships", also with Clifford Nass and Corina Yen. It is often the case that psychology studies simply confirm what our own intuition tells us. How often have we looked at a psychology study and said, "Duh! Of course that would be the case." It is much rarer to see psychology studies that would yield results completely contrary to what we would expect, and this is what makes the work of Nass et. all so exciting. The most surprising thing about these experiments were that participants, even expert computer users, were adamant that they could not possibly be influenced by a computer who has a female voice vs. a male voice, or a computer that praises versus criticizes, or heck, a computer that has the same physical color that is the favorite color of the user, but it turns out that they are. It is not that people anthropomorphize computers; they clearly recognize that computers are not in fact people -- but hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have hard-wired many of our responses, which are often largely automatic even when our interactions are with computers instead of other humans. As others have indicated, there is a fine line, however. Do you recall the sad Mac? [1] This was an example of the Media Equation that was applied well -- you and I and even naive computer users know that computers don't __actually__ get sick, but you can't help but think so as your first reaction when you see that icon; you might even feel a little sympathetic. Simultaneously, have you ever seen the Clippy Office Assistant? [2] It's notorious for being one of the worst examples in history of affective computing design; unlike the sad Mac, it actually will elicit anger, the opposite of what we would want in a computing experience. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Media_Equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Media_Equation [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Mac#Sad_Mac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Mac#Sad_Mac [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippy