The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships

Written by Clifford Nass and Corina Yen

Narrated by Sean Pratt

STARTLING INSIGHTS INTO PERSUASION, TRUST, EMPATHY, AND TEAMWORK BASED ON REVELATIONS ABOUT HOW WE TREAT OUR COMPUTERS

The driver was insistent: “A woman should not be giving directions.” 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 “protect” a computer's feelings, feel flattered by a brown-nosing piece of software, and even do favors for technology that has been “nice” to us. All without even realizing it.

Nass has found that the most powerful strategies for working with people can be learned from watching what succeeds and fails in technology interfaces. If a computer can make friends, build teams, and calm powerful emotions, so can any of us.

Nass's studies reveal:
• Mixing criticism with praise-a popular tactic for managers-is a destructive method of evaluation.
• Opposites don't attract-except when one gradually changes to become more like the other.
• Flattery works-even when the recipient knows it's flattery.
• Team-building exercises don't build teams-but the right T-shirt can.
• Misery loves company-but only if the company is miserable, too.

Nass's discoveries push the boundaries of both psychology and technology and provide nothing less than a new blueprint for successful human relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Sep 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781596596665

Reviews for The Man Who Lied to His Laptop

[page.fault · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book provides an entertaining peek at the intersection of technology, sociology, and psychology. It discusses various experiments which indicate how people anthropomorphize inanimate technology and how this tendency can be used to reduce confounding variables and better understand human behaviour. It wasn't quite what I had expected: given the title and blurb, I had thought that the book would focus more on the mathematics and technology than the sociology. Instead, I found that the book instead discussed how technology could be used to improve sociological experiments and how these experiments, in turn, could be used to improve interfaces for human and computer interaction.


I found the writing itself somewhat problematic. I thought that Nass's ego tended to get in the way of the story-telling. Basically every successful experiment discussed was Nass's, and he is quick to point out how he solved issues that had been plaguing other "lesser" scientists for years.At some point, I started to count how many times the phrases "I solved," "I discovered," "I showed," etc, popped up, but I quickly lost count. In addition, the layout of idea/anecdote-experiment-conclusion-reaction became somewhat repetitive. However, one benefit of this format and dearth of overall narrative structure is that if a reader was only interested in particular areas, it would be easy to skip to those sections.

The ideas ranged from the obvious to the surprising and unintuitive. One of my favourite examples was Nass's discussion of how he had been brought in as a consult for Microsoft about the disaster that was "Mr. Clippy, the Animated Assistant." I remember Mr. Clippy. The first advanced setting I learned in Word was how to turn the darned thing off. Nass's advice, backed up by experiments, was to make Mr. Clippy tell the user that he is stupid (thereby flattering the user's ego) and apologize and berate himself and Microsoft whenever he made mistakes. For some reason, Microsoft wasn't exactly happy with this...can't imagine why... Overall, definitely an interesting read from a renowned scientist.

[bragan_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Clifford Nass has done a lot of consultant work on computer interfaces and how people respond to them, and in the course of this career, he came to the realization that people react to computers very much the same way they react to other people, so that if, for instance, a computer does something that would be considered rude coming from a human being, that makes people like the computer less. Eventually he realized that this could also be turned around: if people respond to computers the way they respond to other people, we can perhaps learn some things about human social interactions by conducting psychological experiments using computers. So in this book, he talks about various experiments that he and others have performed, what he thinks they mean, and how that knowledge can be applied. (E.g., he learned that people interacting with a computer in a driving simulator performed better and liked the computer more if its tone of voice matched their own mood. So he concludes that trying to motivate a sad person by being relentlessly cheerful at them is probably counter-productive.)Some of these experiments are really interesting, and some of the thoughts Nass has about them seem both insightful and useful. But, as is often the case with this kind of thing, his conclusions often are often much stronger and more sweeping than the actual evidence seems to warrant. I'm also dubious about some of his basic claims about psychology, especially in his chapter on personality. And I'm not just saying that because he labels introverts like me as "submissive" and "cold," although that certainly didn't help endear him to me. In fact, it made me seriously wonder why on earth I should be listening to detailed advice on how to handle social interactions from a guy who clearly doesn't even have a clue when he's insulting people. Also, the rather creepily cold-blooded emphasis on how to manipulate people in corporate settings makes me think that I am really, really not the target audience for this book, despite my interest in both psychology and computers. And I am devoutly glad that I don't work for a company that subscribes to his painfully rah-rah ideas about "team-building."To be honest, I think I would have been much more interested in how human social instincts need to be taken into account in software design. Maybe I should have read his previous books, instead, although considering how much he managed to rub me the wrong way with this one, I think I'll pass.

[st5croixsue · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Surprising conclusions on how we interact with computers and what our interaction with technology can teach us about interacting with other humans.