{"id":1732,"date":"2016-02-07T10:12:45","date_gmt":"2016-02-07T10:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/?p=1732"},"modified":"2016-02-07T10:12:45","modified_gmt":"2016-02-07T10:12:45","slug":"feedback-from-a-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/?p=1732","title":{"rendered":"Feedback from a computer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in Feb 2011 <\/a>– gosh that’s five years ago – I was blogging about some contradictory results on how people respond to feedback from a computer. The “computers as social actors” hypothesis contends that people react to feedback from a computer as if it were from a human. In my own work, I found some evidence of that, though I also found evidence that when people don’t agree with the feedback, or perhaps just when they don’t understand it, they are quick to blame the computer as having “got it wrong”.<\/p>\n

The other side to this is that computers are objective, and – in theory at least – there is less emotional baggage in dealing with feedback from a computer than in dealing with feedback from a person; you don’t have to deal with the aspect that “my tutor thinks I’m stupid” or, even perhaps even worse for peer feedback, “my peers think I’m stupid”.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this in reading an interesting little piece in this week’s New Scientist<\/em>. The article is about practising public performance to a vritual audience, and describes a system developed by Charles Hughes at the University of Central Florida. The audience are avatars, deliberately designed to look like cartoon characters. A user who has tried the system says “We all know that’s fake but when you start interacting with it you feel like it’s real” – that’s Computers as Social Actors. However, Charles Hughes goes on to comment “Even if we give feedback from a computer and it is actually came from a human, people buy into it more because they view it as objective”.<\/p>\n

Wong, S. (6th Feb 2016). Virtual confidence, New Scientist<\/em>, number 3059, p. 20<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in Feb 2011 – gosh that’s five years ago – I was blogging about some contradictory results on how people respond to feedback from a computer. The “computers as social actors” hypothesis contends that people react to feedback from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,331],"tags":[364,449],"class_list":["post-1732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-as-social-actors","category-feedback-from-a-computer","tag-computers-as-social-actors","tag-feedback-from-a-computer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1732"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1738,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions\/1738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}