Towards a Sociolinguistics-Based Framework for the Study of Politeness in Human-Computer Interaction
This addresses the need for more systematic research on politeness in social computing and HCI, though it is incremental as it builds on early work.
The authors tackled the problem of designing polite human-computer interactions by proposing a sociolinguistics-based framework focusing on clarity and politeness, and found in a lab experiment that politeness manipulation was successful while clarity manipulation failed, providing empirical support for the framework.
Politeness plays an important role in regulating communication and enhancing social interactions.Research suggests that people treat interactive systems as social agents and may expect those systems to exhibit polite behavior. We augment early research in this area by proposing a framework that is grounded in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. The framework focuses on two complementary concepts - clarity and politeness. We suggest that these concepts are pertinent to various domains of interactive technologies and provide examples for the applicability of clarity and politeness rules to human-computer interaction (HCI). We conducted a laboratory experiment, in which politeness and clarity served as independent factors in the context of a cooperative computer game, based on the Peekaboom game. The manipulation of clarity failed, yet politeness was manipulated successfully based on the framework's rules of politeness. The results provide empirical support for the basic propositions of the framework and may facilitate more systematic research on politeness in various domains of social computing and other areas related to HCI.