Customer Reviews

The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships

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Lie to your computer?

Well, sure. In today's high tech world, lying to one's computer is little different than sweet talking your car, pleading with a slot machine to produce a winning combo or threatening a big garden boulder that refuses to move.

In other words, it's really about how people react to situations good and bad. The basic reasoning is simple: People have an instinctive "personal" commitment to the task at hand. We are hard-wired to cooperate with others, as deftly explained by Michael Tomasello in 'Why We Cooperate.' As Nass and Yen make delightfully clear in case after case, it's human nature to talk to machines.

Many years ago, Dale Carnegie wrote the classic 'How to Win Friends and Influence People.' Nass would have would have listened to car drivers and truck mechanics and written "How to Talk to Your Car and Influence Trucks.' Since computers are now ubiquitous, he listens to people talk to computers. The result won't make the computer any smarter, but it does a lot for people.

The result is a superb book about people. Computers are like cats, the gods of our society. Neither cats nor computers listen to humans, but people pay attention to both and are much the better for it. Look at a Neolithic effigy and think of the conversations Neanderthals had with it.

The chapter on teams and team building is wonderful. Most team building gimmicks are like watching the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders -- they amuse the fans but don't teach players a thing about football. Fans want to see a winning team, more so than fancy pants dance routines.

In business, cheerleader events are "wilderness bonding" and other play-acting gimmicks. Instead of fantasy events, Nass and Yen describe how people react to situations good and bad. Yes, repeating that phrase is deliberate, because the book deals with dozens of real situations -- good and bad. It's an exercise on how to deal with people, using machines as a neutral example.

Consider, for example, a car that tells people how to drive safely. It sounds wonderful; but, if not done properly, it enrages drivers and causes accidents. Now, think of bosses who tell employees how to work efficiently and effectively; if not done properly, they enrage people and cause output to decline.

Having spent much time since the 1960s telling people what to do ... all I can say is I wish I had had this book in the 1960s. The premise is ingenious; namely, if you can learn to speak properly to your machines, you'll do fine when dealing with people.

People are social beings. It can be argued that the concept of self can only be defined in the context of our own interest in what other people are thinking and feeling. Nass realizes that these social behaviors may be so ingrained that they appear even when interacting with computers, and conducts his psychology experiments using machines as easily controllable partners.

The results are interesting. Many actual studies are described and explained, which I like better than a more prose-heavy argument. However, I disliked how few counterarguments were presented, and how simplistic people were at times made up to be. While there certainly are patterns in human behavior, I don't think situations are always as cut-and-dry as the authors make it sound.

Even if I don't think it's applicable to every situation, I learned a lot about social science from this book, and how to quantify or measure some abstract concepts. Things like retrograde interference, identification/interdependence, and valence/arousal are useful ways of thinking about how people behave, and they're explained very well. It is also particularly helpful that there is a focus on counter-intuitive findings, which end up making sense and forming an overarching consistent picture.

I can only echo Nass' praise of Corina Yen's writing, which must have made it able to transform a large quantity of data into a clearly presented argument, with the right emphasis and concision to make it an absorbing read. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to gain some insight into how people (yourself included) think and why they act the way they do. With practice I even think it will make me a better reviewer!

It's great when a book that is this full of serious research is also well written and highly entertaining. Nass and Yen bring together a collection of experimental results that repeatedly demonstrate how people treat computers like other people, and how we can draw conclusions about human social behavior from these human-computer experiments. The book is a great read--informative and funny, if a bit creepy when you think through its implications. I wrote a longer reaction on my blog:[...]
Disclaimer: I received a review copy from the publisher.

Cliff Nass is a researcher at Stanford. His specialty is studying human behavior through the use of technology. In particular, he has computers play the role of humans. This allows him to do two things:

- Control the variables much more closely than if he were to involve a human. For example, take testing similarity (i.e., how well people respond to people like themselves). If Nass uses an actual human, there are any number of things for the participant to attend to: gender, age, appearance, etc. If he uses a computer, though, he can control the one variable he's after. For example, in testing dominance (a basic personality trait), Nass simply has the computer respond textually to the user, with only the words showing a dominant (self-assured) or submissive (uncertain) tone.
- Make the leap much more easily from technology to human. For example, if users are more likely to help out a computer (by helping it with an algorithm for translating colors from RGB to HIS format by ranking a set of colors from lightest to darkest) that does a favor for them (by giving them more helpful advice on a problem-solving task), how much more likely are they to translate the same basic reciprocity to an actual person!

All of this is based on the fact that humans interact with computers much as if they were human beings (he discusses this in detail in the intro).

He uses this methodology to study a number of important issues. Helpfully, these are grouped very logically, under personality, emotion, persuasion, etc. Also, the issues themselves are real ones, ones that the average person might encounter, especially on the job:

- What's the best way to give criticism?
- How useful is team-building?
- As the old saying goes, does misery love company? What kind of company - happy, miserable, neutral, constructive?
- When it comes to persuasion, what's more effective, expertise or trustworthiness?

The overall structure is one of question, experiment to get an answer, then discussion of the results. I found this particularly useful, plus it gives you a real feel for how reliable (i.e., data-based) his results really are. There are also very useful summaries at the end of each chapter to review what was covered and decided.

Finally, Nass also introduces some very valuable constructs to ground his questions and findings. For emotion, for example, he posits that all emotions can be basically charted on a graph with two axes, valence (negative to positive) and arousal (calm to excited). He also has a similar grid for personality, with one axis affiliation (cold to friendly) and the other control (submissive to dominant). These really make sense.

What really sets this book apart, though, is the writing. Apart from the excellent structure and organization I've already hinted at, the writing style itself is so straightforward, flowing, fun, and easy to read that it makes what might be some rather daunting stuff an absolute pleasure to read. Funny to say for a book like this, but this thing was a real page-turner.

This book was really good and insightful. The tone of the book was kind of commical throughought the entire thing, yet it had serious times as well. His writing style is that of the scientific theory. He presents a problem or a questoin. He does an experiment, observes and records data. Then he shares his results and slims it down for the average person to read.
The content of the book was something similar to what you would find in a self-help book only with proof, research, and degrees to back him up. Even though the title has laptop in it and one automatically assumes that it will be about computers it is not. In fact I even started thinking how one could lie to a laptop in the first place. When I started readin I was taken aback to learn that it did involve computers but only as the medium through which he obtained conducted his experiments.
As far as the overall impact of the book goes, well i was thouroughly impressed. He is straight forward, blunt, to the point and yet still delivers the news to readers with humor to be less devistating. Most people can't stand to be told their wrong. This book actually fixes most of the problems we face entering a new work place or even getting through a particularly grueling interview. I would and have recommended this book to my friends and others.

This book is meant to give some ideas on how to run a workplace, how to manage people, and how to deal with people. The author used a series of computer tests, with different researchers and participants, to gauge how the participants handled different scenarios. His findings suggested that how we normally treat and reward people, is counter-intuitive to how they should be.

Nass designs many interesting social experiments based on the premise that humans react similarly to machines as they do to other humans, so that machines are at least as suitable experiment confederates as human assistants since their actions are programmed and deterministic. In his own words, "I've uncovered many of these findings through my discovery that people treat computers and other interactive technologies like actual people. Watching people work with computers in social situations lets me strip away complexity and get to the fundamental truth of everyone's interactions."

Although it seems to me like some of experiments could have design flaws or overly simplistic conclusions, the research is relevant and interesting, dealing with a broad array of topics such as how people respond to mindless flattery versus informed compliments, the impact of valence emotions, modesty versus praise, the importance of imitation, interdependence and identification in teams, cognitive reframing, and the rule of reciprocity.

I liked how the book was organized with first the description of the question, then the experiment design, then the results and implications, and then each chapter ending with a summary of key points. Because Nass often works as an consultant to businesses or software design companies, the research and implications were often related to business situations, resulting in advice from perspectives such as the most effective way to deliver negative criticism to coworkers, or how to be viewed as an expert. This book was not technical, assumes no prior knowledge, and appeals to a broad audience. It is more about human-human interaction as revealed through human-computer interaction experiments than it is about computers or technology, except for the underlying assumption that humans at least somewhat treat computers as people.

Clifford Nass and Corina Yen did a wonderful job in creating and organizing this book. The idea of using computers and interactive simulations to identify the essence and implications of human interactions was genius. I would recommend this book for anyone in education or business.

The topics covered in this book are worth learning about and I found myself instantly engaged after reading the first chapter online. However, after getting about halfway through the book, I found myself quite bored. The writing is very dry and the book follows a very cookie cutter format of laying out an experiment then explaining the results with quite a bit of unnecessary filler in between. There are many experiments where the results are quite obvious, and while I understand the need to prove them through experimentation, their explanations are often too drawn out.

This book could have easily been at least one-hundred pages shorter and made its point with far more precision (I don't know if it is just me but there was a definite overuse of exclamation points that made the writing seem less credible). I think perhaps the writer could have taken a few tips from his research to convey his information in a more digestible format.

I was ready for some new insights into psychology but this book really didnt deliver. It's an ok read but the conclusions of the experiments are predictable once you read the descriptions. If you read any psychology or self help books the results and info might not be informative at all. It makes me wonder what the benefit of using the computers was. And the lauding of the colleages throughout the book was a bit odd. About half way through I felt myself just plowing through it to finish instead of thinking. It's an ok read but not a reference type of book as I was hoping.