ArticleIntegrative psychological & behavioral science2022
Anthropomorphizing Technology: A Conceptual Review of Anthropomorphism Research and How it Relates to Children's Engagements with Digital Voice Assistants.
Article in Integrative psychological & behavioral science, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Investigating the Integration and the Long-Term Use of Smart Speakers in Older Adults' Daily Practices: Qualitative Study.JMIR mHealth and uHealth · 2024Article
- Ethics and Governance of Neurotechnology in Africa: Lessons From AI.JMIR neurotechnology · 2024Article
- Exploring children's exposure to voice assistants and their ontological conceptualizations of life and technology.AI & society · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
'Anthropomorphism' is a popular term in the literature on human-technology engagements, in general, and child-technology engagements, in particular. But what does it really mean to 'anthropomorphize' something in today's world? This conceptual review article, addressed to researchers interested in anthropomorphism and adjacent areas, reviews contemporary anthropomorphism research, and it offers a critical perspective on how anthropomorphism research relates to today's children who grow up amid increasingly intelligent and omnipresent technologies, particularly digital voice assistants (e.g., Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri). First, the article reviews a comprehensive body of quantitative as well as qualitative anthropomorphism research and considers it within three different research perspectives: descriptive, normative and explanatory. Following a brief excursus on philosophical pragmatism, the article then discusses each research perspective from a pragmatistic viewpoint, with a special emphasis on child-technology and child-voice-assistant engagements, and it also challenges some popular notions in the literature. These notions include descriptive 'as if' parallels (e.g., child behaves 'as if' Alexa was a friend), or normative assumptions that human-human engagements are generally superior to human-technology engagements. Instead, the article reviews different examples from the literature suggesting the nature of anthropomorphism may change as humans' experiential understandings of humanness change, and this may particularly apply to today's children as their social cognition develops in interaction with technological entities which are increasingly characterized by unprecedented combinations of human and non-human qualities.
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