SOCIALIZING CONSISTENCY - Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations - page 362

shared knowledge, because even if one of the people speaking has never been to the place, there is
often a characteristic of the location (e.g., urban vs. rural, a famous landmark, a friend who lived
there, etc.) that provides a starting point for shared understanding.
A second reason for inquiring about a person's geographic origins is that place of origin can be
just as powerful as gender and personality in allowing a person to predict his or her conversational
partners' attitudes and behaviors. Throughout most of human history, people's place of birth
predicted their culture, language, and familial ties, because cultures appeared within regions and
there was limited mobility from one region (and hence culture) to another (Anderson et al., 2002;
Jackson, 1985). Thus, when someone describes himself or herself as an “Easterner,” a “Texan,” or
a “Laplander,” his or her interaction partner obtains much more than simply knowledge about natal
locale. Like gender and personality, place of origin is one of the most critical traits defining a per-
son (Hamers and Blanc, 2000; Lippi-Green, 1997). Indeed, place of origin can be a greater predic-
tor of people's attitudes and behaviors than gender or personality, because although each person
interacts with many others who do not match his or her gender or personality, the vast majority of
people one encounters during one's formative years come from the same place and culture that the
developing child does (Scherer and Giles, 1979).
In embodied interfaces, voice accent and word choice are some of the most powerful indicators
of place of origin and culture. Because languages do not have an “official pronunciation,” every
speaker (human and non-human alike) has an accent (Lippi-Green, 1997; Pinker, 1994; Trudgill,
2000). “Accent-neutralization” (Cook, 2000), an active topic of discussion as telephone-based call
centers move to countries with lower wages and different accents, is a misnomer: Although speak-
ers can change their speech to reflect the most common para-linguistic cues in a particular locale,
this simply involves replacing one accent with another rather than eliminating an accent (Nass and
Brave, 2005, Chapter 6).
Clearly, consistency of accent over time is critical both for people and machines. If an interac-
tion partner's voice changed, for example, from a thick Southern accent to an Australian accent
over the course of a conversation, the speaker would surely be perceived as odd and untrustworthy.
However, inconsistencies in place of origin and culture can crop up in another less obvious form as
well, because there is another socially relevant meaning to the term “place of origin”: where one's
ancestors came from (Nass and Brave, 2005). This is usually referred to as “race,” and is generally
indicated by physical appearance (Gallagher, 1999).
Throughout most of human history, migration was very limited, so language and race were con-
sistent: People who looked like a given race almost always belonged to the culture associated with
people of that race, and vice versa (Nass and Brave, 2005). Indeed, culture and race were so inex-
tricably linked that the term “ethnicity” has come to be used interchangeably for both (Britannica
Editors, 2002). However, these two definitions of place of origin are not intrinsically related.
Designers of embodied interfaces might initially rejoice in this fact, thinking it provides the perfect
opportunity to create an interface that appeals to two user populations simultaneously. For example,
create an onscreen agent whose face suggests Asian descent, but whose voice exhibits a heavy
southern accent: This approach should please both groups! However, it is possible that even such
reasonable “inconsistencies” would prove to be disorienting for users and lead to the same types of
negative effects that we have seen for inconsistencies in personality and gender.
Consistency of Ethnicity as Exhibited in Voice and Face
To test the effects of ethnicity consistency on users, an experiment with an online e-commerce site
was conducted (Nass and Brave, 2005, Chapter 6). A total of ninety-six male college students