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7. Users' Subjective Experiences and
Ascribing During HCI
7.1 Motivation
The aforementioned philosophical and psychological theories and
concepts, as well as the examples from empirical studies, suggest that
the development of ascribing, like aims, motives, even personality
characteristics, to computers does occur in HCI. In terms of Dennett's
argumentation, it means: Because computers are perceived by ordinary
users as complex, but optimally constructed and with highly complex
physical processes occurring inside, it is impossible to explain or
predict their behavior within physical or functional stances. Thus,
to our minds, it is probable that users adopt the intentional stance;
the computer's behavior is explained by ascribing mental states, and
therefore they experience the computer as an intelligent, humanoid
counterpart (they anthropomorphize it). We presume that positive and
negative ascribing towards computers affect the experience and form
of the interaction with the system, in such a way that a systematic
empirical investigation of users' ascriptions is worthwhile. Therefore,
we ask ourselves the following questions:
How do users experience the interaction with the simulated system
and what ascriptions do they make?
Which effects arise from the subjective experience and the ascribing
of the form and development of the interaction?
How do users experience a system-initiated affect-oriented
intervention within a critical dialog situation during HCI?
7.2 Methods and results
We conducted semi-structured interviews using a subsample of
subjects after the WoZ experiments (Lange and Frommer, 2011). Such
interviews enable people to reflect and explain their thoughts, beliefs,
feelings, and processes in a free, non-restricted way. Besides the
other advantages of this method, the individual inhibition threshold
can be reduced, e.g. if someone has the feeling of being naive when
ascribing humanlike characteristics towards a technical system. Each
of our interviews starts by encouraging spontaneous narration about
subjective experiences during the experiment. This was prompted
by the interviewer: “You have just done an experiment. Please try
to put yourself back in the experiment and tell me how you did
during the experiment. Please tell me in detail what you thought and
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