PROPERTIES OF THINKING AND FEELING TRANSFERRE D FROM HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION TO SOCIA L INTERACTIO N ETHEL H . HANSO N This study provides empirical support for the two-par t claim that (a) people acquire modes of thinking an d feeling in their day-to-day intej action with computin g systems and (b) under some conditions, they transfe r these modes of thinking and feeling to thei r interactions with people . It does so within the contex t of occupational socialization of adults, acquirin g training and expertise in programming languages . An approach to characterizing domains of interactio n is presented, based on work in social psychology o n cognitive structure and episode cognition . Th e resulting interaction profiles include cognitive an d affective properties : cognitive differentiation refers to how finely a person distinguishes one event fro m another ; abstract integration taps how abstractl y organized a person's thinking is, about those events ; level of liking indicates how much a person likes o r dislikes events in a domain ; extremity of liking refers to how extreme a person's feelings of liking are . Using a regression strategy for analyzing processes o f mediation and transfer, results support the hypothesized claim for each of the four properties . Long-term computing experience has negative effect s on cognitive differentiation, abstract integration an d liking, but a positive effect on extremity of liking, i n both domains . Results also support across-domai n transfer hypotheses . This transfer may have negativ e consequences for a programmer's social life and menta l health . One unexpected finding suggests that effects of multi-lingual programming experience on the cognitiv e properties are not linear, but may be undulating o r sinusoidal-like, with decreasing mean over time . This cross-sectional quantitative case study provides a good first glimpse at hitherto unexamined phenomena . The findings initiate a new area of inquiry â devote d to studying how the many forms of ou r interdependence and interaction with nonhuma n technological systems contribute, directly an d indirectly, to how we live our lives and think of ourselves as human beings . They also demonstrate th e usefulness of this approach to episode cognition, an d enrich our understanding of the process o f occupational socialization . SIGCHI Bulletin January 1991 Volume 23, Number 1
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