What I'm Reading: Clifford Nass & Corina Yen, "The Man Who Lied to His Laptop"

This book was a recommendation from a friend of mine who runs a robotics company, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The hook is that people apparently tend to interact with computers in much the same way we interact with other people, i.e. we tend to treat computers as if they are social agents. For instance, if you ask people to use a piece of software and then answer a questionnaire about how much they liked it, they will rate it higher if you ask them the questionnaire on the same computer they used for the software versus if you ask them the questions on a separate computer! Even though the experiences and questions are identical, on some level people don’t want to “upset” the computer by giving it a bad rating!

Given our tendency to do this, Nass and Yen think computers can be used for all sorts of fun psychological experiments that would otherwise be difficult to do, because getting a person to replicate the same behaviour over and over to study a participant’s responses under laboratory conditions is impossible, whereas getting a computer to do the same thing repeatedly is a breeze. Unfortunately, though I think that starting point is really cool and interesting, some of the things they do with it I find a bit less convincing.

Some of the studies they describe I think are a bit dodgy, or else they simplify them for this (very accessible) book and gloss over the details. There’s a lot of points where I’ve made annotations asking how something was measured, how some conclusion some reached, or questioning some assumption that underlay the test. For instance, Nass and Yen note (fascinatingly) that certain behaviours tend to correlate with certain others: if someone exhibits behaviour X, there’s a Y% chance they’ll also exhibit tendencies towards behaviour Z. That on its own is amazing and cool! But from this, they then say that there are two types of people, Introverts and Extroverts, and that’s a step too far: to say that there are distributions of statistically predictable behaviours is not the same thing as reifying those distributions into discrete, all-encompassing camps. And that’s a problem, because a lot of the experiments they describe use moves like that as a starting point.

And here’s where things really got interesting: I mentioned this book was recommended by a friend who owns a business, and I think I can see why he likes it. A lot of the stuff in this is about how to fit people into categories to manage them better in a workplace; how to construct team building exercises; how to give corporate feedback; which ‘personality types’ to pair with which in office environments... Not that there’s anything wrong with that per se, it’s just not the most interesting use I think this material could have been put to. It fed my personal suspicion that personality typing is a sinister astrology for management consultants. (Not dissing management consultants, that’s just not my speed.) There’s also some moments where things jump into some very specious evolutionary psychology...

Not that there aren’t some cool or interesting tidbits as well. Just that they were overshadowed by the rest. If you are a manager or a management consultant, this could be a fun book for you and you can get it here! If not, I’d say you can probably skip it.