Reviews for The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us about Human Relationships

The average rating for The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us about Human Relationships based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-24 00:00:00 Ali Zomera Note to self: must always be straightforward with my laptop! Q: Typical discussions about mindsets betray a fixed mindset. (с) Uh-huh. The first rule of the Growth Midset Club is: You do not talk about Mindsets at all. I wouldn't be so sure that this really was flattery: Q:the computer was obviously and unambiguously flattering: (seemingly) making random comments. (c) Was it, really? Q: You will no longer use the "evaluation sandwich"'praise, then criticism, then praise again'after learning that it is neither helpful nor pleasant. (c) That much's true: toss the shit sandwitch. Q: You will discover why team-building exercises don't build teams... (c) Hallelujah! Q: How have companies addressed the anxieties triggered by evaluation week? By asking everyone to do more evaluations. (c) Nicely done! Q: If I provide only praise, it sounds like hagiography (the study of saints), but each criticism I add seems to jump off the page. If I am too effusive, I sound like a cheerleader; if I am too flat, it reads like I'm hiding something. And the order problem is overwhelming: is it praise before criticism, criticism before praise, praise-criticism-praise (the evaluation sandwich), or some other arcane formula? (c) Q: ... when a newspaper quotes person A criticizing person B, people develop negative feelings about person B, person A, and the newspaper! (c) Q: "You are not driving very well," the car said. "Please be more careful." Was the driver delighted to hear this valuable information from a highly accurate and impartial source? No. Instead, the driver became somewhat annoyed. ... "You are driving quite poorly now," the car announced. "It is important that you drive better." Was the driver now appropriately chastened? No. His face contorted in anger as he started driving even faster, darting from lane to lane without signaling. ... "You must pull over immediately!" the car said. "You are a threat to yourself and others!" At this point the driver, literally blind with rage, smashed into another car in the simulation. He was so livid I couldn't even understand what he was saying. (c) This situation would have been approved by Philip Dick! Q: Thus, the best strategy in the workplace is a "mutual-admiration society" with another colleague: person A praises person B, and person B praises person A. This will lead to both people seeming smarter and more likeable than if they praised themselves. (c) LOL! Q: I was reluctant to have a computer fall into a person's arms or to strap one to a raft. (c) Othe interesting points: Q: Ironically, I realized that just as studying interactions between people is the best way to discover how people interact with computers, people's interactions with computers could be the best way to study how people interact with each other. (c) Q: In 1998, Microsoft asked me to provide evidence that it was possible to improve one of the worst software designs in computer history: Clippy, the animated paper clip in Microsoft Office. While I have often been asked by companies to make their interfaces easier to use, I had a real challenge on my hands with Clippy. The mere mention of his name to computer users brought on levels of hatred usually reserved for jilted lovers and mortal enemies. There were "I hate Clippy" Web sites, videos, and T-shirts in numerous languages. One of the first viral videos on the Internet'well before YouTube made posting videos common'depicted a person mangling a live version of Clippy, screaming, "I hate you, you lousy paper clip!" (c) Q: Around this same time, my second mystery appeared. A market-analysis firm asked me to explain why employees at some companies had started reporting dramatic increases in the approval ratings of all the software applications they were using. I started my investigation by comparing the newly satisfied users with those who had experienced no change in satisfaction. ... The only difference I found was that the companies that had started reporting higher approval ratings had changed their procedure for obtaining the evaluation. Formerly, all of the companies had people evaluate software on a separate "evaluation" computer. Later, some companies later changed that procedure and had their employees evaluate the software on the same computer they normally worked with. Those companies subsequently reported higher approval ratings. Why would people give software higher ratings on one computer as compared to another identical computer? (c) Q: BMW was forced to recall the product. What was the problem? It turns out that the system had a female voice, and male German drivers refused to take directions from a woman! The service desk received numerous calls from agitated German men that went something like this: CUSTOMER: I can't use my navigation system. OPERATOR: I'm very sorry about that, sir. What seems to be the problem? CUSTOMER: A woman should not be giving directions. OPERATOR: Sir, it is not really a woman. It is only a recorded voice. CUSTOMER: I don't trust directions from a woman. OPERATOR: Sir, if it makes you feel better, I am certain that the engineers that built the system and the cartographers who figured out the directions were all men. CUSTOMER: It doesn't matter. It simply doesn't work. (c) Q: As established in the classic paper on "social facilitation" by Robert Zajonc and much subsequent research, the effect of other students depends on how confident the student is. When you feel confident, having other people present improves how well you learn and perform. However, when you feel insecure, having other people around makes you nervous and pressured so you don't learn as well. As a result, we decided to have the teaching environment be a virtual classroom but with a variable number of students. When users were doing well on the practice tests, more students would appear at the desks, but when their practice test scores were low, there would be fewer students and more empty desks. (c) Q: The results of this study suggest the following social rule: don't hesitate to praise, even if you're not sure the praise is accurate. Receivers of the praise will feel great and you will seem thoughtful and intelligent for noticing their marvelous qualities'whether they exist or not. (c) Q: Fight-or-flight responses are governed by the emotional parts of the brain. These parts can demand action without consulting the higher-order, rational areas of the brain that know the "facts" of the situation. This is why criticism will often generate seemingly irrelevant statements, ad hominem attacks, scapegoating, frantic apologies, and little valuable information. It also explains why people being interrogated have the right to remain silent and why torture very frequently produces false information. (c) Q: ... when you deliver criticism, go deep rather than broad. (c) Q: ... your mindset (as reflected in your criticism) can lead people to stick to their existing strengths to avoid failure or to seek out challenges as a way of improving. When people receive criticism that reminds them of the importance of effort, they gain the benefits of a growth mindset. When you criticize their "inherent" attributes, it encourages a fixed mindset, which in turn makes it less likely that they will improve. Criticism that encourages one mindset or the other is so powerful that it can affect people's future choices and attitudes toward challenges, regardless of their original mindset. (c) Q: Researchers primed one group of participants for a fixed mindset (telling them the task measured their underlying capabilities) and the other group for a growth mindset (telling them the task would help them develop their management skills through practice). (c) Q: ... it seems that whenever social scientists hear that there is something, such as praise, that makes life uniformly better, they have to find a way to screw it up. (c) Q: Previously, I suggested that praise never hurts. This does not mean, however, that all types of praise are beneficial. Telling people that they are "destined to succeed" before they attempt a new activity can make any failures crushing. Thus, fixed-mindset praise, meant to make people feel better, can actually make people feel much worse about their work and more negative about the person who praised them if it turns out to be inaccurate. (c) Q: ... an epidemic of fixed-mindset praise started in the early 1990s, when many parents and teachers became focused on increasing self-esteem by constantly telling children how smart and talented they were. This mindset ironically has a negative effect on self-confidence as children face challenges and failures. For example, when Dweck asked fixed-mindset children why their parents would talk with them if they had performed poorly on something at school, they would respond with comments like, "They think bad grades might mean I'm not smart." In comparison, growth-minded students would respond, "They wanted to make sure I learned as much as I could from my schoolwork," and "They wanted to teach me ways to study better in the future." (c) Q: If you want people to like you and don't care how smart you seem, criticize yourself and praise others. If you want to seem smart and don't care about being liked, than criticize others and don't be modest. However, adopt the latter conclusion with caution because if people do not like you, they will think you are competent but will not describe you positively to others or reward you for your competence. While your criticism will influence them, you will gain a reputation not for excellence but for unpleasantness. And, of course, don't directly criticize the person you are interacting with when you can criticize a third party. (c) Q: In addition to the thoughts and actions of a similar personality being more understandable, they positively reinforce who you are. When someone thinks or behaves the same way that you do, it confirms that your approach to life is the right one. Conversely, an incompatible personality can feel like a challenge or a threat; it subtly implies that your approach to life is wrong. (c) Q: These results also explain a great mystery in social life: despite the strength of similarity-attraction, why do opposites seem to frequently attract? The answer is that opposites attract when, over time, they change to become more similar to each other. Everyone has seen "total opposites" get married and have a happy life together. However, that happiness comes only when the two people change to become more similar to each other, eventually finishing each other's sentences just as married couples who started out similar do. (c) Q: I take it as a genuine compliment when they invite me to team-building events. While delighted by the kind sentiment behind the invitation, I find the actual events a misery. My poor memory, exacerbated by my chronic lack of sleep, makes me seem "unengaged" during the icebreaker. Notorious for my klutziness, I fall backward enough unintentionally that doing it on purpose seems tragic rather than trust building. With my atrocious construction skills, team members have told me that standing still and trying not to touch anything is the best way for me to help finish the bridge. And my weak stomach makes white-water rafting an iffy proposition. Worst of all, I worry that being a somewhat unwilling and less-than-delighted participant in team-building exercises will cement my position as an outsider. (c) Q:

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-06 00:00:00 Priscilla Perry Fittingly, I lied to my phone to access this audiobook. With the library closed for social distancing I'm limited to digital versions of the books I want, and that meant downloading several apps to access titles published in different formats. (We haven't standardized who provides our audiobooks yet?) For each of these, I was asked "Have you read the terms and conditions?" For each of these, I lied and checked "Yes." This isn't what Nass is talking about, really. He's aiming more at the social science of human interaction, highlighted by the goofy ways we treat inanimate objects - most often our computers. 2.5 stars - Passingly entertaining, but more in the realm of business and management nonfiction than I was led to believe. There are engaging anecdotes accessible to tech users of all ability levels, but the author doesn't have the big personality I enjoy in my popular nonfiction. And I can't blame the narrator here - the reader (Sean Pratt!) keeps things lively, but Nass is no Sam Kean.