Falling in Love with a machine.
Love Actually
In psychology 101, we learned an interesting experiment, two people sitting across from each other, having a conversation centred around a list of 36 questions. At the end of the experiment, they fell in love with each other. You might be wondering if it really works. The answer is yes, it does. The reason it works is the conversation encouraged them to disclosed information about themselves. As a result of that disclosure, it increased feelings of closeness, so much that it even matched the average level of closeness that other participants reported feeling in their closest relationships.
You may ask, what if people don’t want to disclose themselves to others? Well, maybe it’s true for some people but psychology research has shown that we like to self-disclose because it makes us feel good. Feeling good has always been a stronger motivator for us to do things. Also, it isn’t just psychology that says so. Neuroscience explains that when we talk about ourselves, there are 3 neural regions that stand out, two of which are associated with pleasure, motivation, and reward. So, simply speaking, the reason we love talking about ourselves (no matter how interesting the other one’s story is), it’s because it feels good, it is intrinsically rewarding.
Love actually can be just opening up, talking about ourselves to another. It can give us an increased feeling of closeness, even bring us closer relationship, love and even marriage.
Engineering Love
Human love is so much more complex than any algorithm in the world. While it is intriguing, it is also terrifying to learn that love can be engineered in 36 questions. If humans can fall in love with each other out of having a conversation, can the conversations we have with machines be engineered in a similar way?
Humans are complicated but our understanding of humans is growing. Thanks to science, we have discovered more ways of measuring and differentiating different personalities, mental models, emotions, needs and motivations, we have become better at predicting consumers behaviours, and providing more relevant content at the right time. Technology has its strengths but one thing it needs is principles of human psych to guide its innovations. The companies who are focusing on human-centred design or technologies will be the ones that win the customers’ love and loyalty.
Despite the negative publicity in recently years, Facebook’s undeniable success is largely based on their understanding of the human psych - for example our need to self-disclose. Humans love to see and be seen. Facebook and Instagram are the greatest technology inventions ever created to allow us to do that easily. Endless status updates on Facebook and tweets about our every mundane thought or activity often seem like so much wasted time but every good feeling (however short-lived) is real.
Our love for social media may be saturating as we experience more texting fatigue; but our lives are turn into a multi-tasking epidemic. Something else is emerging and integrating fast into our lives: voice-controlled assistants like Alexa, Siri and other technologies such as Area22’s voice interface that empowers natural conversations.
Human evolution has made voice to be our most effective method of communication. We are hardwired to use all our senses so it’s not hard to predict that most of our digital screens will include voice functionality in the future. Since having conversations with these technologies will be inevitable, we have a great opportunity to build the next generation voice solutions with a bit of love.
Can you fall in love with a machine?
The concept of loving a machine doesn’t really sound so strange anymore. What’s strange is that how normal we feel about trusting machines. Just last week, Waymo, Google’s self-driving car unit announced that it would begin offering driverless rides in San Francisco. The success of self-driving cars doesn’t depend on engineering success nor on understanding how the technology works. It depends how you get people to trust the idea that a self-driving car allows us to do what we are already doing but in a much safer manner. If we can trust a machine with the safety of our life, then trusting a machine with our feelings seems much easier.
I am sure that falling in love with or even marrying a robot are entirely possible but scientifically speaking, are there things we can do to bring more closeness between humans and machines?
1. Mode of interface affects self-disclosure
• Will people share more via Text or Voice?
• Which voice is better: Male or Female?
• What happens when bots pose as humans?
The design of interface can affect how much information we disclose. Research shows that people are more open with machines because they believe computers don’t judge and that they’re more ethical (although it is not entirely true). If people can speak and listen to a machine, it increases their silliness to share more personal information than texting. That is because speaking and listening can trigger social actor mechanisms that result in more disclosure; however, this disclosure can be influenced by many other factors such as the gender of the voice. For example, if you use a male voice, a study shows that people tend to skip more frequently as the questions became more invasive.
Google’s AI-driven voice project - Duplex is making dinner reservations and hair appointments by phone without any interaction from the user. In the demo showed in 2018, Duplex already possessed exceptional human-like speech capabilities, made itself sound more like a real human, and made it nearly impossible to tell whether we were speaking to a robot or a human. While bots posing as humans are more efficient and more persuasive, the transparency and efficiency trade-off brings its own concerns such as spamming, scamming and even people’s capacities to trust and form bonds might be damaged when we start doubting the humanity behind each telephone call?
2. A machine that flatters
• Will you return a compliment to a robot that praises you?
Reciprocation is one of the most powerful influencing principles which has been primarily applied to human- human interactions. For example, if Linda praises Joe, then Joe would feel obligated to reciprocate Linda’s sentiment in some way. In the human to machine realm, one might assume that humans simply have no social obligations to machines, but in fact, research found that reciprocity occurs even in human-machine dialogue. It isn’t so surprising really if you have watched children interacting with Alexa, how they are using the same social etiquette (Alexa, can you please…).
BJ Fogg also researched the effects of computers that flatter and found interesting results.
• Flattery from a computer can produce the same general effects as flattery from humans.
• Praise from a computer is extremely powerful because it makes people feel better about themselves.
• People like those who flatter them.
• People who received flattery from a computer thought the interaction was more enjoyable.
There are more positive effects a flattery computer can have on human.
What does all this mean for businesses?
To build a better, closer, more trusting relationship with your customer, especially through voice enabled technologies, it is important to design the right interface, for example, nudging customers to use voice more (because it increases disclosure, and disclosure increases closeness… etc)
To build capabilities to better engage with customers and make them love you, perhaps creating opportunities for you customers to talk about themselves and try giving them a little flattery, they will feel empowered.
Self-disclosure makes us feel good. As our conversations switch between H2H and H2M, there is an opportunity and responsibility for technology innovators to ensure the human enjoys the positive effects from our interactions in a safe and ethnical way.
This article is written by Jing Reilly. Jing Reilly is a CyberPsychologist and Consumer CyberPsychology Lead for Area22.
Area22 are focused on transforming our experience of search in the Metaverse by leveraging the power of conversational voice. Conversational voice has the capacity to completely re-write how we all engage with technology - bringing us closer to a real human experience.