The power of persuasion: Computers vs. People
Gualdagno and Cialdini (2007) examined persuasive techniques on counter-attitudinal topics. While they found that both men and women were more easily swayed by people they believed to be like themselves, men were more likely to be persuaded via e-mail, and women responded better to face-to-face interaction. This effect was especially pronounced when the persuader was considered "unlike" the subject.
Stern and Mullinix (2004) examined the persuasiveness of human vs. computer-generated speech. While they found that women were more persuaded than men in general, and that human speech was more persuasive than computer-generated speech in general, there was no gender-by-modality effect. Audio vs. video presentation seemed to have no effect.
Who among us hasn't gotten a computer to swear? It seems to be a truism of human nature that if you sit someone down in front of a speech-generating-computer, the first thing they'll do is try to get it to curse, sometimes at length (stupid Speak & Spell, and its curse filters). The swearing computer never fails to amuse, perhaps because the computer has no meaning, no emotional tone behind its words. The removal of emotional tone may explain part of why men are more easily convinced by email, and why women are not. Gualdagno and Cialdini used same-sex confederates in their experiments on persuasion; I would be interested to see whether there was an opposite-sex effect.
In fairness, I should admit that I am fairly easy to persuade, but I could probably be talked out of that.
Stern and Mullinix (2004) examined the persuasiveness of human vs. computer-generated speech. While they found that women were more persuaded than men in general, and that human speech was more persuasive than computer-generated speech in general, there was no gender-by-modality effect. Audio vs. video presentation seemed to have no effect.
Who among us hasn't gotten a computer to swear? It seems to be a truism of human nature that if you sit someone down in front of a speech-generating-computer, the first thing they'll do is try to get it to curse, sometimes at length (stupid Speak & Spell, and its curse filters). The swearing computer never fails to amuse, perhaps because the computer has no meaning, no emotional tone behind its words. The removal of emotional tone may explain part of why men are more easily convinced by email, and why women are not. Gualdagno and Cialdini used same-sex confederates in their experiments on persuasion; I would be interested to see whether there was an opposite-sex effect.
In fairness, I should admit that I am fairly easy to persuade, but I could probably be talked out of that.