A Cultural Perspective in Social Interface

The study reported in this paper explores the validity of the hypothesis that Human-Computer interaction displays the same dynamics as HumanHuman interaction. The study also addresses the issue of universality and cultural dependency of social responses in Human-Computer interactions. A series of psychological experiments are conducted both with American and Japanese participants on their social reciprocal behaviors toward computers. The results of the experiment indicate that people treat computers as social actors and reciprocate help as though computers are real humans, and that people implicitly apply social norms in Human-Computer interactions based on their own cultural backgrounds.