Presentation Comments: 1 & 2

Facebook Intro group

Great presentation! I thought it was incredibly engaging and visually pleasing. I found your results and reasoning on probes very interesting. Intuitively, it may seem a bit odd that people ask questions that they already know the answers to. However, in terms of face, it makes perfect sense. Using equity theory, Person B wouldn't want to encrouch on Person A's negative face (autonomy) by providing information that Person A had not explicitly allowed him to have. I enjoyed this finding because of how well it related to the theories we talk about in class.

Emotion group

I really enjoyed your spin on the Hancock et al. study. I think evoking genuine emotion was a great next step. I think someone hit the nail on the head when we discussed in class how people may want to come off as outgoing and friendly upon meeting new people. This would help explain why your results were not what you anticipated. Your presentation overall was incredibly clear and really easy to follow. I sincerely enjoyed it. I especially liked your questionnaire samples on your slides. Great job!

Final Presentation Comments

#1 Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Cute title! I definitely think it was a shame that you guys weren't able to run more dyads because it seemed like you were getting really interesting results. I think the comment that was made that maybe your data could be reinterpreted in light of the hyperpersonal model was spot-on. Maybe the CMC medium was affecting their feelings by allowing them to self-select and overattribute comments? Also, they were able to imagine whatever they wanted about the other person, probably assuming that they were going to be like them? Great presentation guys.

#2 Examining Emotions in CMC

Color-coordination at its best (although the details of Kevin's undies were maybe a little bit TMI for me...)! Great tag-teaming with the presentation. It was too bad that your original hypotheses didn't work out neatly (as lab-buddies we were definitely rooting for you too), but it seems like what you did find was really interesting. It made sense to me that people would actually try to hide their sad emotions since we generally like to be around positive emotions more than negative emotions, and you might not want to express your sad emotions to someone you'd just met. However, just like our study, it seems like they were leaking cues (more past tense, etc) that receivers weren't picking up on. But then people's were moods being lifted just from being in conversations with people they didn't know? And they were actually lifting the moods of people who hadn't even been made sad? That's definitely some intriguing stuff!

Final Presentations

Emotion Group - Great job on the powerpoint. I like that there was little text and more explanation from you all. It kept the topic interesting and focus on you all. The samples of your questionaires were also nice giving us a idea of what and how your questioned the participants and what you were looking for. Another thing i thought was very nicely down was the constant changing of speakers with different topics. Alot of people had just went one by one as they spoke but your group seemingless transitioned back and forth between topics. It kept the presentation very interesting!

Gender group - Awesome presentation. Very interesting results. I am really surprised that the class was unable to guess the gender from the readings of the different instructions. Seems that there is a definite trend that males and females may have in writing and giving instructions but mabye when reading so many one after another it may tend to desensitize us of our ability to accurately guess. I know at the end of reading the twenty or so pages, I was confused! And yes I was one of the ones that insisted that "bunny ears" had to be female though.

Presentations - Gender & Emotion

GENDER

You guys did a good job on your presentation. The “bunny ears” thing is pretty funny, and I will be interesting to see what other words you guys may find when doing a similar word analysis. It’s pretty amazing you guys found differences in men and women despite participants not even realizing they were there! It brings up a very interesting debate (and further research) about what’s causing this phenomenon linguistically, as well as what implications this may have for the recitation of instructions. I think it would be interesting to see if the linguistic analysis program could detect any of the gender linguistic differences. It would also be interesting to see if these results can be generalized in other mediums — namely FTF and over the phone. Knowing what you know now, it would be cool to see how adding the added cue of voice plays a role, as well as the non-verbal cues of FTF.

EMOTION

I was interested by your study because it seemed so intuitive, and I wanted to know if your hypotheses would prove true. Even though it don’t come out the way you wanted, I think that’s great too because you learned about another variable that might affect the process, which (I think, at least) is cool too.

I liked your presentation. It was clear overall and I enjoyed it (the color coding was a nice touch!). Good work relating things to Jeff’s study. I think people wanting to be amicable upon a first meeting as a face-related procedure definitely would explain your data. I know I would never want to express my sad emotions – especially upon first meeting someone – as I wouldn’t want one instance of my emotions to represent me as a person in someone else’s mind.

Final Presentation Comments

#1: Politeness

Yours was a great project idea! Although the technology is interesting, you showed that it wasn't effective enough, and would even have negative effects on customers who detected that they were receiving canned answers. It's also useful that your data could even be used to study politeness outside of your study of LiveChat; other researchers may be able to extend this to see how else people construe (or misconstrue) messages as polite based on word count, word choice, and other characteristics that your data provide. Your presentation of your project's concept and data went quite smoothly; good job!

#2: Emotion

Your presentation reflected a lot of effort in preparation: figuring out who would present exactly which parts, including questionnaire samples so that your audience could follow along, and even color-coordinating your outfits boldly. The fact that your experimental receivers' moods appeared less negative was surprising; it's apparently common for people to mask negative moods. It'd be interesting to see results for a variety of friends and strangers, though; I generally try to conceal negative moods from strangers or acquaintances, while closer friends can generally tell how I'm really feeling. Likewise, while strangers and friends alike may try to sympathize (and therefore also sound negative), would either group try to talk significantly more positively in an attempt to cheer someone up? Overall, very nicely done!

pres. comment #2: emotion

Congrats on the successful motivation manipulation!!! I appreciate how important that result is, having grappled with it in our group as well. The explanations of your results were very clear and well reasoned, which made it easy for the audience to follow your examination of a lot of factors. While contrary to your hypothesis, your finding that experimental receivers' moods also became less negative after the conversation is really interesting. I think your explanation of this observation was right on in suggesting the possible positive social effect that interpersonal communication can have on both participants.

Great presentation--your hard work really paid off.

Presentation Comments

Grounding:

I really enjoyed your presentation since you guys made your procedure and findings very clear, and especially because you examined your data critically even though your results were totally unexpected. I think this also has really cool real world implications, as it would make people really think about how to design CMC technology to take the grounding into account. I thought the comments from the class regarding the possible interpertations of the study were really intriguing as well. I thought of another possibility, which is that maybe the presistent nature of instant messaging would let both parties better analyze what their partner was saying. You did a great job overall, and good luck with your results and writing your paper!

Facebook - public vs private:

Great job on your presentation! I thought you guys had great visuals, which really aided your presentation. You have a lot of great data in there, and I'm sure that your final paper will have lots of cool findings. I liked your choice of using Facebook to explore the private vs. public setting, because it's so salient in our lives right now, and you can definitely expand your findings to other settings. The idea of audience that you presented really brings the course full circle to one of the first things that we learned in 450. Great job!

Presentation Comments

#1 - Facebook Common Ground

I was interested in your project because it seemed like one of the few studies of the new phenomenon of large groups (myspace, friendster, etc.) online. Great job on your speech and with finding results! First, I liked the diagrams that you used in your presentation - they were cute, well-drawn, and made your concepts easier to understand. One question I had about your project was why the participants did not have any obligation to click on the facebook link in the email you sent them. As you also stated in your presentation, perhaps if you explicitly told the participants to click on the link, you would have obtained more significant results. Also, it seemed like you stated your interpretations of the results as if they were facts; I think you should have emphasized that these were only speculations on your part. However, overall I was excited to hear your interpretations and I thought that given the limitations that you stated, the study turned out very well. Thanks for a ground-breaking study in this field!

#2 - Deception

I was impressed with how well you executed your project - I would imagine it is very difficult to deceive people in studies such as this one. It was also really interesting that your study was a kind of continuation of Professor Hancock's study. I thought that everyone in your group spoke clearly and well, giving your presentation a professional feeling. Also, the division of your results and interpretations into Q1, Q2, etc. helped a lot with clarity. One thing I didn't understand was that your two hypotheses seemed to be contradicting one another. I was also wondering if your choice to put an icebreaker at the beginning of the conversation was based on previous research or your own speculations. Overall, great interpretation of your results and an exciting study!

Group Comments - Gender and Emotion

Gender and Communication

Great presentation! I really liked the way that you introduced your study, and the methods section was incredibly clear. It looks like you guys got some very interesting results, and I think they have some very interesting implications for the creation of web pages – depending on the intended audience, it might be a good idea to have it created by someone of the same gender.

I do agree with Jeff, though, in that you needed more visuals and more graphs. (I especially thought that the literature review section could have used a lot less text and a few more visuals). Also, graphs will be helpful in your paper for explaining your results.

Overall, I really liked your presentation and your study. Thanks for sharing it with us!

Emotion

First of all, great job coordinating your group for this presentation. I think my favorite part of the entire presentation was the fact that you guys “tag teamed” – it definitely kept the audience on its toes! In addition, I think you guys did a fantastic job of showing us examples during your methods section; it was really helpful to see what your questionnaires actually looked like.

After working in the lab with you guys, I’m so glad to see that you got some interesting results! It’s too bad that your hypotheses weren’t confirmed, but at least your mood induction worked. I think that the way you interpreted your findings was also great. Overall, a really nice presentation, and a great way to close the course!

Comments on Presentations

#1- Grounding/FOOK:

This was a really interesting research project. I thought you guys did a great job with your presentation, especially explaining your procedure in a way that made the complexity of it easy to understand. The results are very interesting becaue they are counter intuitive- who would have thought that talking on AIM could be more conducive to common ground than face to face? I think it would be really cool if you guys continued this study and got more participants. Awesome study and great job!

#2- Politeness:

This study was really interesting. I think this research has a lot of important implications for the corporate world, especially companies that are trying to improve thier customer service ratings. One would think live chat would be the magical solution because it gives the customer a faster answer and easier access than email and is more direct than calling up and pushing different keys and being put on hold before talking to a customer service representative. However, like you guys proved, having the live chat feature might hurt companies who use it because the customer feels like they were treated very rudely and got a canned answer. If I was a company debating whether or not to put live chat in my website, I would definitely consult your research before making my decision, in order to not offend and potentially lose valuable customers. Cool project and excellent job!

Comments

#1- Grounding

Overall, I thought your presentation was really clear and interesting. I liked that you had such clear results, even though they went the opposite way of your hypotheses. So a few things-- like we mentioned in class, I too thought that SIDE might have some interesting implications for your study. Also, do you think that the ability to think about what you say before you send it on AIM might make people think that the words had a more powerful effect?

Also, I think that the instructions may have played a role in the figures. CMC does have some interesting effects for things that are task oriented, definitely worth thinking about, I think.

I don't know that I ever understood why you asked about public figures-- I forgot to ask in class. Was that a control for something? Also out of curiosity, which Eliot poem did you use?

Still, great stuff overall, I think your findings are really cool.



#2- Emotion

I wrote down a few things while you guys were presenting, much of which we talked about, but I'll reiterate and add some things here. Do you think the "get to know" instruction affects how people emote? Do people "play" happy or extroverted in conversations? I guess this brings up two separate points. One is meeting a new person. That is to say, I would think that people are more likely going to seem extroverted when meeting someone new to such an extent that it could overwhelm the sadness. This might have an interesting effect if friends were talking instead of strangers, I wonder how that could effect things. Also, the very nature of the task, I wonder (even if it were strangers) if a different task other than "get to know" would have different results. Still, I thought your presentatin was well done, loved the matching outfits. And I thought your findings were definitely really cool. To be honest, I didn't think Sophie's Choice would affect people in such a way it could be detectable, but I thought it was super cool that I was wrong. Great job!!

Comments

Facebook Common Ground:

I really liked the general idea of seeing how people would act when they had knowledge but might not think it polite to put forth their knowledge/common ground directly. The different ways people approached it, from acting like they hadn't seen the Facebook to casually asking questions that would lean towards information they had gleaned from Facebook, was fascinating in what is says about how people determine the most polite or best way to act in conversation. Really interestin stuff. Great work.

Emotion:

Really interesting project, guys. I find the idea of emotion as a contagion and the differences in how accurately people can detect others' emotions in different mediums really fascinating. I agree with the general sentiment that it would be interesting to do the experiment with friends, and see if they fare better. All around, great idea and great analysis.

Comment #2: Emotions Group

Wonderful presentation! I was intrigued by your experiment the moment you decided to do it. I was curious to see whether or not, and to what degree you can truly induce emotion (such as sadness) in participants. It's so fascinating finding out that when the experimental group watched Sophie's Choice, they actually felt a lot more sad than the control group. I thought that the participants would try to repress their emotions since they're participating in an experiment and don't want to seem affected by it. But I'm not surprised at the actual result. However I still think that the induced emotion, however real it might be, is still not strong enough than emotions that people feel in their everyday lives, that is, how they feel when something happens around them. I think that, in order for someone to truly be saddened, they have to either experience something that they can relate to, or something like a sad movie (in which they have to sit through the whole thing and not just watch part of it). Only then will their emotions be strong. Therefore, one possible reason for your result (i.e. dyads couldn't detect their counterpart's emotions accurately) might be that the induced emotions weren't strong enough for others to detect.

Also, someone mentioned that friends might be better at detecting each other's emotions. I think
this is very true. If you know someone, you'll know how they act when they're sad--the subtle facial muscle movements, or the look in their eyes. But if you don't know someone, then you might not be able to pick up these subtle elements that indicate the emotional state that your partner is in.

Comment #1: Grounding Group

Great job on your presentation guys!
I think it's interesting/surprising that you found in your results that your participants were better at assessing each other's knowledge of the poem in an online medium rather than a face-to-face medium. One would think that, if you can see the person that you're talking to, you'd be better at gauging their understanding of the poem because of the abundance of visual/audio cues (i.e. from facial expressions to tone of voice). More generally, I think face-to-face overrules most other communication techniques in terms of aiding in someone's understanding of something. However, as Will mentioned today, we might have overlooked the social aspect of this. That is, when two strangers are put together in a room and are required to interact with each other on a specific topic, not only might it be uncomfortable, but i'd imagine it'd also be awkward. And because of this, the intended effect of having the dyads have a conversation (i.e. so that they can gauge how well each other understood the poem) may not be achieved. Of course, this might not be the case at all. I think with any experiment, it's important to have a large sample size. But given the time limit, I think you guys did great! :D

Comments

Grounding:

Wow, you definitely got some really interesting results. I think the fact that the participants thought they influenced their partner more over AIM than FtF is explainable - there are fewer visual cues that might suggest otherwise (they can't see their partners shake their heads, etc). But the fact that they were more successful in guessing each other's knowledge over aim is quite unintuitive. You'll have to closely analyze the transcripts to see why the conversations were so different. Maybe there was a lot of superfluous material in FtF that distracted from the utterances about the poem. Great job overall!

Emotion:

It's great that your participants were not suspicious of the setup of the experiment and that mood induction worked as planned. They fact that emotion could not be detected by the participants' partners, even though there were clear language differences, is very intriguing but not necessarily surprising given the content of your transcripts. Indeed, for example, most people would probably not associate the use of past tense with being in a sad state. Also, I'm sure that the fact that the two were strangers had an impact - I find it fairly easy to detect the mood of someone I know well over AIM. Nice presentation and good luck on the rest of your analysis!

#1 [Comment]: Gender and Shoelaces

Very nice job on the presentation. I was intrigued to see what your results would be since we had to fill out the 24-page-or-so packet in class. I'm glad to see the turnout was pretty telling! A thought: I don't know if this is in any way analyzable, but the descriptions people give may be related to how they were taught to tie their shoes. My reason for that consideration is that I know at one point or another I was taught by a "bunny ears" metaphor by my mother, but I've rejected it for the "threading the needle" approach that I learned from my peers. Consequently, when filling out the questionnaire, I felt more that "bunny ears" style was more feminine than alternatives. Maybe I'm just weird like that, haha. Anyway, great job!

Pres. comment #1: politeness

Great job presenting - props for going first, too! It definitely seems like there are some serious complications to rating politeness, as you guys acknowledged with the potential word count/cannededness conflict - of something technically fitting the criteria of "polite," but really not feeling polite.

I also found it really interesting that you experienced different "felt" impressions of politeness across synchronous and asynchronous media, even if the same words were used. This observation certainly says a lot about the influence that our expectations have on how we perceive the quality of an interaction. Based on your observation, one suggestion you may offer to designers of automated synchronous help chats such as LiveChat would be to add a feature that would make the user feel more like they were being helped by a real person, like adding a "helper is typing..." feature on par with AIM.

Presentation Comment 2

Gender group

So men don't use the word "bunny" to describe how to tie a shoe...not surprising, but interesting nonetheless. I would have thought that at least one male would use this analogy to describe the shape of the loops. And the normal person has trouble guessing the gender of the describer...this could be because we have so many fixed notions of the linguistic styles of men and women. As Kate pointed out, it would be interesting to find out if an automated linguistic program could detect the gender of a speaker because this program doesn't have the preconceived notions that humans do and wouldn't be distracted by these notions. You did really good work with such a complicated (at least to me) subject.

Presentation Comment 1

Politeness group

I thought your presentation was great. I liked the fact that you found results for politeness in different media, but saw that this politeness was due to canned messages, which in themselves, can be seen as impolite! How interesting. Your study and others like it can be useful in trying to find ways to make online questions and answers less impersonal and polite to more personal and polite. Good effort and fascinating content.

Presentation Comments #2

Deception/Motivation group:
Your study is fascinating. I think that even though many of your results weren't significant, that still says a lot. Kailyn's comment makes an excellent point that we are simply really bad at detecting deception, in any situation, and we also are accustomed to believing that someone is telling us the truth. I think this definitely contributes to the finding that each group had about the same level of detection. I also think that your finding of a much higher word count in the high motivation condition is really interesting, and unexpected. I would love for you (or anyone) to dig deeper into this, and to try to find out why this actually happens. Great job guys.

Presentation Comments #1

To the gender group:
I really enjoyed your presentation, and hearing your findings. I was amazed that despite the fact that you found so many linguistic differences between men and women, we (as raters) were simply unable to do any better than chance at guessing the gender of the author. I would be really interested to see if, given these linguistic diferences, something like a automated computer program could do better at guessing the gender of the author, as a computer could just focus on these things while we are distracted by so many factors and are unaware of what is truly a difference between men and women's writing styles. Really neat results!

on gender and instructions

The finding that females use "bunny" analogies a lot in giving instructions to tie shoes was not very surprising, but slightly enlightening. I remember when I filled out the packet, I was thinking that "bunny ears" and other references like that seemed to be much more "girly" and thus, I chose female as the person giving the directions. I think it was a big giveaway, and maybe instructions about something that doesn't have a cute animal analogy would be harder to determine girls from boys. Other than that, it was interesting to know how the gender of the rater factored into how they rated female and male instructions. Overall, it was a nice presentation. Good job!

on raising the stakes

I'm thrilled that this group got results and that most were headed in the right direction (if they weren't significant). I really liked that they chose to look at anxiety words. It's very interesting that these words come into our language even though we probably don't even realize it. Given the truth bias and the fact that the receivers weren't really expecting lies, it's not a big surprise that the detection accuracy was low. I don't think most people would think a stranger would lie. I also really would have liked to hear the punishment clip. I watched you guys run this study so much that I'm pretty curious about what your participants had to listen to.

Cornell Language and Technology

Deception and Motivation in CMC presentation
When I first heard the big question about whether raising the stakes would change the way we lie and how good are we at it, I thought that people highly motivated might be better just because they would have a reward and take more time in completing the lie. Your study shows otherwise. Interesting that there is no significance between low motivation and high motivation. But you did find that highly motivated participants used more words. This could lead to more insight on lying and language use.