The media equation - how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places

By Byron Reeves, Clifford Nass. 1996

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Human-Computer Interaction

Citations in the corpus

Open-Domain Conversational Agents: Current Progress, Open Problems, and Future Directions (2020, background): “Since humans tend to engage with machines in a social way (Reeves and Nass, 1996; Lee, Kiesler, and Forlizzi, 2010), it is important for conversational agents to be able to respond with empathy.”
Towards Empathetic Open-domain Conversation Models: A New Benchmark and Dataset (2018, background): “While many of those studies deal with human-human interactions, humans have been shown to often interact with machines in a natural and social way (Reeves and Nass, 1996; Lee et al., 2010), so it is reasonable to expect that dialogue agents would also benefit from empathetic responding.”
Automation and Accountability in Decision Support System Interface Design (2006, methodology): “The human tendency to anthropomorphize computers has been well-established (Reeves & Nass, 1996).”
Handbook of new media : social shaping and consequences of ICTs (2002, background): “Although debates continue about the nature and quality of mediated interaction, especially in contrast with face-to-face conversation as the presumed 'ideal' mode of interpersonal communication (Lievrouw and Finn, 1990), mediated interactivity nonetheless has long been cited as a definitive differen”
Psychological, Relational, and Emotional Effects of Self-Disclosure After Conversations With a Chatbot (2018, background): “According to this framework, people instinctively perceive, react to, and interact with computers as they do with other people, without consciously intending to do so (Reeves & Nass, 1996).”
The Programmer’s Assistant: Conversational Interaction with a Large Language Model for Software Development (2023, background): “” The literature on Computers as Social Agents (CASA) helps us interpret this result as it demonstrates how computers are often treated like people [56, 67].”
Avoiding the uncanny valley: robot appearance, personality and consistency of behavior in an attention-seeking home scenario for a robot companion (2008, background): “Nass & Reeves (Nass et al., 1995a; Nass et al., 1995b; Reeves & Nass (1996)) suggest that this attribution of personality to a wide range of technological artifacts (including computers and robots) is difficult to avoid.”
The Cyborg's Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments (2006, background): “Given the thousands of years of anthropomorphic projection, it is perhaps not surprising when recent research reminds us that we tend to anthropomorphize computers and treat them as "social actors" [( Reeves & Nass, 1996 )].”
Should an Agent Be Ignoring It?: A Study of Verbal Abuse Types and Conversational Agents' Response Styles (2019, methodology): “According to the Computers-Are-Social-Actors paradigm, people tend to treat a computer as a human [8].”
A hands-off physical therapy assistance robot for cardiac patients (2005, background): “It is well established that people engage with physically embodied creatures, even simple ones, and ascribe life-like properties to them [16].”
Virtual Customer Service Agents: Using Social Presence and Personalization to Shape Online Service Encounters (2014, background): “Following social response theory, which states that people respond to computer systems treating them as social actors (Reeves & Nass, 1996), these findings can be explained by arguing that knowledgeable agents signal behavior normally associated with humans.”
Serious games for higher education: a framework for reducing design complexity (2008, background): “In addition, the media equation theory of Reeves and Nass (1996) claims that only very little representational or technological efforts are necessary to provoke true interpersonal responses.”
Examining the effects of robots' physical appearance, warmth, and competence in frontline services: The Humanness‐Value‐Loyalty model (2021, background): “Previous theoretical frameworks such as computers are social actors (CASA, Nass & Moon, 2000; Reeves & Nass, 1996) already considered that humans treat machines as social agents but they ignored that the current advancements in technology allow robots to actually look and behave as social agents in…”
Computers that care: investigating the effects of orientation of emotion exhibited by an embodied computer agent (2005, background): “Yet, recent evidence suggests that we orient towards computers as social actors, much as we orient socially towards other humans (Reeves and Nass, 1996; Nass and Moon, 2000).”
Receptionist or information kiosk: how do people talk with a robot? (2010, background): “According to social actor theory, people interact with machines as though they are other humans [ 41 ], but many studies show that this response depends on other factors, such as the form factor of the machine [39], whether people think their interaction is with a computer or person [36], the presum”