The Man Who Lied to His Laptop

People interact with computers in a way similar to how the interact with other humans. People will return favors to computers and behave "humanly" to computers, even while denying they are doing so.

A few interesting studies presented:

• Americans will reciprocate to a helpful computer, helping it out after it helped them; however, they will not help out another computer.
  
• Japanese will reciprocate to a computer family. If a MAC helps them, they will help all Macs
  
• If a computer is part of somebody's team, they will favor its input over a non-team member
  
• People are much more willing to volunteer information to a computer if they computer first volunteers information to them
  
• People favor a computer that follows expected stereotypes. A male voice is trusted more in physics discussions, while a female voice is trusted more for relationship discussions. Inappropriate accents (such as an Asian face with an Australian accent) are treated poorly.
  
• People liked a computer that flattered them; while they respected one that criticized others
  

Computers turned out to be a great model for human behavior because they were able to invariably model the desired behavior. People would treat the computer's behavior similar to how they would treat humans in similar situations.

From this, attributes of human activity were determined. People love to be flattered. People don't like to be criticized. They also don't like people that criticize others. However, they think people that criticize are smarter. People respect and trust people with whom they have a common bond. They are also able to pick up on differences between verbal and nonverbal behavior, and are very put off by it.

In all, it is a very good book analyzing the subconscious social behavior of the human animal.