This morning, in todays' Wall Street Journal, I was fascinated by these two paragraphs in the article, Sweet Talking Your Computer:
If you were asked how much you liked, say, a plate of lasagna, you would undoubtedly say nicer things to the chef than you would to a person who had no connection to the chef. This would be the polite thing to do. Would you also be overly nice to a computer that tutored you for 30 minutes and then asked how well it taught you?
To find out, I ran an experiment at Stanford University. After being tutored by a computer, half of the participants were asked about the computer's performance by the computer itself and the other half were asked by an identical computer across the room. Remarkably, the participants gave significantly more positive responses to the computer that asked about itself than they did to the computer across the room. These weren't overly sensitive people: They were graduate students in computer science and electrical engineering, all of whom insisted that they would never be polite to a computer.
Having been in close terms with too many computers over too many years, I'll confess to developing certain affections but only on the same level I do with my M150 Pelikan fountain pen. A good tool is a good thing. It might be interesting to deal out the data to see if there are any breaks along the age of the participants. Maybe my daughters have a closer emotional relationship with their digital gear than I do with mine.
Oh, and one more thing about this article: It has a priceless description of Microsoft's "Clippy" debacle. Must read.
