Do people like working with computers more than human beings?

This paper incorporates the concept of mindlessness from research on human-computer interactions with social exchange theory from sociology. We find that participants behaved no differently toward human or computerized partners during a repeated standard trust game. Despite exhibiting similar behaviors with these partners, participants believed that computers were more likely to share their interests during this game than humans. These participants also reported higher levels of commitment with computerized partners than human partners. Our results suggest that asking about social constructs (i.e. commitment) will break mindlessness in human-computer interactions. These results also highlight a disconnect between individual behaviors and their perceptions during human-computer interactions. We conclude that telling participants their partners are computers may actually improve their perceptions of interactions after they occur.