Matching users’ diverse social scripts with resonating humanized features to create a polite interface

The mental scripts that prescribe the way people interact with other people or with computers are experientially characterized and context sensitive. For this reason, CASA research should be more sensitive to the divergent nature of social scripts, through which people respond to human features on interfaces and through which they treat computers as social actors. Using politeness as an example, this study first investigated people's politeness orientations, and then their perceptions of websites containing error pages with messages featuring three different politeness strategies. Two hundred thirty-four senior high school students participated in this three (politeness orientations) by three (error messages) by two (frustration levels)-factorial experiment. Three-way ANOVAs and simple main effects analyses showed that people with different politeness orientations do respond differently to messages with different politeness strategies and different levels of associated frustration. This study shows that more research effort should be focused on whether and how the CASA phenomenon manifests itself in different computer-use situations and/or with different people.