SOCIALIZING CONSISTENCY - Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations - page 364

additional source of alienation and a feeling that these interfaces are “not for us.” As with gender,
it is important that interfaces capture the range of accents for both production and recognition in
order to reduce stereotypes and to be more accommodating to increasingly diverse populations.
EMOTION: “COMPUTER EMOTION” IS NOT AN OXYMORON
Gender, personality, and ethnicity are examples of social characteristics known as traits: relatively
permanent intrinsic characteristics. This chapter has demonstrated the critical importance of con-
sistency when it comes to traits. Users expect embodied interfaces to look, sound, and act in a way
that is consistent with the interfaces' assigned social categories. Traits serve as important baseline
for understanding and predicting the behavior of others (Fiske and Taylor, 1991).
People, however, are also affected by their environment. While traits give us a broad sense of
what a person will think and do, predicting a person's behavior at any given moment in time also
requires attention to state , that is, the particular feelings, knowledge, and physical situation of the
person at a particular point in time. While extroverts are generally talkative, they might be as silent
as introverts in a library, or even quieter when they bump into their secret crush. The most “femi-
nine” female will exhibit a range of masculine characteristics when protecting a child. In a group,
people often submerge their identity as they blend in with and mimic the people around them
(Simmel, 1985). People also vary their linguistic styles based on the communities of practice
(Wenger, 1998) with which they are engaged (Eckert, 2000). While traits provide the general trajec-
tory of an individual's life, every specific attitude, behavior, and cognition also can be influenced by
momentary states.
Of all the types of states that predict how a person will behave, the most powerful is emotion
(Brave and Nass, 2002). Rich emotions are a fundamental component of being human (Brave and
Nass, 2002). Throughout any given day, affective states—whether short-lived emotions or longer-
term moods—color almost everything people do and experience, from sending an e-mail to driving
down the highway. Emotion is not limited to the occasional outburst of fury when being insulted,
excitement when winning the lottery, or frustration when trapped in a traffic jam. It is now under-
stood that a wide range of emotions plays a critical role in every goal-directed activity (Brave and
Nass, 2002), from asking for directions to asking someone on a date, from hurriedly eating a sand-
wich at one's desk to dining at a five-star restaurant, and from watching the Super Bowl to playing
solitaire. Indeed, many psychologists now argue that it is impossible for a person to have a thought
or perform an action without engaging, at least unconsciously, his or her emotional systems (Picard,
1997; Picard, 1997; Zajonc, 1984). Consistency is crucial when it comes to emotion. For example,
when mothers are inconsistent with their verbal and vocal emotional cues, their children are more
likely to grow up with behavioral and emotional problems (Bugental et al., 1971; Gong, 2000).
Within groups of such children, boys whose mothers used more inconsistent communication were
found to be more aggressive in school than those with mothers who used less inconsistent commu-
nication (Bugental et al., 1971; Gong, 2000). Being able to detect a person's emotional state is
extremely useful for choosing if, when, and how to approach the person in order to have a success-
ful social interaction. Many of us have felt the frustration of being sent “mixed signals.” This frus-
tration stems from being unable to disambiguate how to interact with the person next time due to
inconsistencies between his or her words and his or her paralinguistic cues, which lead to dislike of
the speaker (Argyle et al., 1971; Gong, 2000). In human-human communication, such inconsisten-
cies are often used as indications of insincerity, instability (Argyle et al., 1971; Gong, 2000), or
deception (Gong, 2000; Mehrabian, 1971). If it is true that people will interact with computers in the
same way that they interact with people, it is likely that such negative perceptions of voices are not