Media Equation

Abstract

Research based on the media equation has shown that people treat nonhuman technological objects and mediated representations socially and naturally. In their seminal works, Reeves and Nass conducted experiments replicating well‐established social science findings on how people behave in a natural environment or with other people, only changing the experiment procedures and materials to have participants perform tasks with mediated representations or with computers. The Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) framework, extending the media equation, has highlighted that social responses to computers are primarily driven by mindless application of overlearned social scripts, not by conscious and deliberate anthropomorphizing; the CASA framework has also contributed to elucidating some of the boundary conditions (e.g., mindlessness, anthropomorphism, information processing style) and the role of agency perceptions in social responses to computers. In the contemporary media environment where agents, robots, and artificial intelligence are becoming ubiquitous, the media equation/CASA framework will continue to advance the efforts to understand human–media interaction and relationship.