Abstract People believe they should consider how their behavior might negatively impact other people, Yet their behavior often increases others’ health risks. This creates challenges for managing public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined a procedure wherein people reflect on their personal criteria regarding how their behavior impacts others’ health risks. We expected structured reflection to increase people's intentions and decisions to reduce others’ health risks. Structured reflection increases attention to others’ health risks and the correspondence between people's personal criteria and behavioral intentions. In four experiments during COVID-19, people (N = 12,995) reported their personal criteria about how much specific attributes, including the impact on others’ health risks, should influence their behavior. Compared with control conditions, people who engaged in structured reflection reported greater intentions to reduce business capacity (experiment 1) and avoid large social gatherings (experiments 2 and 3). They also donated more to provide vaccines to refugees (experiment 4). These effects emerged across seven countries that varied in collectivism and COVID-19 case rates (experiments 1 and 2). Structured reflection was distinct from instructions to carefully deliberate (experiment 3). Structured reflection increased the correlation between personal criteria and behavioral intentions (experiments 1 and 3). And structured reflection increased donations more among people who scored lower in cognitive reflection compared with those who scored higher in cognitive reflection (experiment 4). These findings suggest that structured reflection can effectively increase behaviors to reduce public health risks.
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Social Boundaries for Personal Agents in the Interpersonal Space of the Home
The presence of voice activated personal assistants (VAPAs) in people's homes rises each year [31]. Industry efforts are invested in making interactions with VAPAs more personal by leveraging information from messages and calendars, and by accessing user accounts for 3rd party services. However, the use of personal data becomes more complicated in interpersonal spaces, such as people's homes. Should a shared agent access the information of many users? If it does, how should it navigate issues of privacy and control? Designers currently lack guidelines to help them design appropriate agent behaviors. We used Speed Dating to explore inchoate social mores around agent actions within a home, including issues of proactivity, interpersonal conflict, and agent prevarication. Findings offer new insights on how more socially sophisticated agents might sense, make judgements about, and navigate social roles and individuals. We discuss how our findings might impact future research and future agent behaviors.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734456
- PAR ID:
- 10169394
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 12
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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