The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What We Can Learn About Ourselves from Our Machines

In The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, Stanford professor, sociologist and HCI researcher Clifford Nass shares dozens of eye-opening discoveries about human nature and sociality. This book is chock-full of intellectual goodies and surprises surrounding relationships, team building and collaboration. What’s truly fascinating about his insights is how they were teased out: through studying interactions with computers!

Nass learned early on that we actually extend our social niceties and norms to computers as if they were living, sentient beings. This insight allowed Nass to perform a wide-range of social experiments where interpersonal behaviors could be studied through controlled, perfectly repeatable interactions. For example, Nass demonstrates that it’s possible to invoke a sense of team cooperation between humans and computers by creating the proper conditions for team identification and interdependency. These human-computer teams consistently out-performed those who were not identified and engaged as teammates.

This book is highly recommended for managers and team leads of all stripes, as well as those who are heading in that direction. If you design and/or build digital applications or interfaces this may change the way you perceive and approach the medium itself. It certainly had that effect on me.

Grab a copy, you will not be disappointed.