STARTLING INSIGHTS INTO PERSUASION, TRUST, EMPATHY, AND TEAMWORK BASED ON REVELATIONS ABOUT HOW WE TREAT OUR COMPUTERS
The driver was insistent: âA woman should not be giving directions.â Despite the customer service rep's reassurance that the navigation system in his car wasn't actually a woman-just a computer with a female voice-the driver (and many others like him) refused to listen. There was only one person for BMW to call for help: Clifford Nass, one of the world's leading experts on how people interact with technology.
After two decades of studying problems like BMW's GPS system, Microsoft's Clippy (the most hated animated character of all time), and online evaluations that led people to lie to their laptops, Nass has developed a powerful theory: Our brains can't fundamentally distinguish between interacting with people and interacting with devices. We will âprotectâ a computer's feelings, feel flattered by a brown-nosing piece of software, and even do favors for technology th