HOW REAL ARE COMPUTER PERSONALITIES - PSYCHOLOGICAL RESPONSES TO PERSONALITY-TYPES IN HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

How ''real'' are computer personalities? Using a psychological criteri on for ''reality,'' 2 studies tested whether people respond to compute r personalities the same way they tend to respond to human personaliti es. In. Experiment 1, dominant and submissive subjects were randomly m atched with a computer endowed with the personality characteristics as sociated with dominance or submissiveness (N = 48). Consistent with si milarity-attraction. theory in interpersonal interaction, subjects wer e more attracted to the similar computer compared to the dissimilar co mputer Experiment 2 (N = 88) used the same experimental design to asse ss users' psychological responses to changes in personality-based beha vior in computers. Consistent with gain-loss theory in interpersonal i nteraction, changes in the direction of similarity had a more positive effect on attraction than a consistently similar personality. Loss ef fects were not obtained. The findings suggest that computer personalit ies are psychologically real to users.