Awareness cues are computer-mediated, real-time indicators of people’s undertakings, whereabouts, and intentions. Already in the mid-1970 s, UNIX users could use commands such as “finger” and “talk” to find out who was online and to chat. The small icons in instant messaging (IM) applications that indicate coconversants’ presence in the discussion space are the successors of “finger” output. Similar indicators can be found in online communities, media-sharing services, Internet relay chat (IRC), and location-based messaging applications. But presence and availability indicators are only the tip of the iceberg. Technological progress has enabled richer, more accurate, and more intimate indicators. For example, there are mobile services that allow friends to query and follow each other’s locations. Remote monitoring systems developed for health care allow relatives and doctors to assess the wellbeing of homebound patients (see, e.g., Tang and Venables 2000). But users also utilize cues that have not been deliberately designed for this purpose. For example, online gamers pay attention to other characters’ behavior to infer what the other players are like “in real life.” There is a common denominator underlying these examples: shared activities rely on the technology’s representation of the remote person. The other human being is not physically present but present only through a narrow technological channel.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
To avoid confusions, let us distinguish between social cognition as the scientific enterprise and as the mental process. In this chapter, “Social Cognition” refers to the former and “social cognition” to the latter.
References
Augoustinos, D. and Walker, D. (1995), Social Cognition: An Integrated Introduction. Sage Publications Inc.
Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52 (1), 1—26.
Bardram, J.E. and Hansen, T.R. (2003). The AWARE architecture: supporting context-mediated social awareness in mobile cooperation. In Proceedings of CSCW’03, ACM Press, New York, pp. 192—201.
Bargh, J.A. and Ferguson, M.J. (2000). Beyond behaviorism: on the automaticity of higher mental processes. Psychological Bulletin, 126 (6), 925—945.
Burak, A. and Sharon, T. (2003). Analyzing usage of location based services. In Proceedings of CHI’03, ACM Press, New York, pp. 970—971.
Carroll, J.M. (1997). Human-Computer Interaction: Psychology as a Science of Design. Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 61--83.
Chalmers, M. and Galani, A. (2004). Seamful interweaving: heterogeneity in the theory and design of interactive systems. In Proceedings of DIS’04, ACM Press, New York, pp. 243—252.
Dourish, P. and Bellotti, V. (1992). Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In Proceedings of CSCW’92, ACM Press, New York, pp. 107—144.
Dourish, P. and Bly, S. (1992). Portholes: Supporting awareness in a distributed work group. In Proceedings of CHI’92, ACM Press, New York, pp. 541—547.
Deci, E.L. and Ryan, R.M. (2000). The “What” and “Why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11 (4), 227—268.
Dreyfus, H. (1992), What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Endsley, M. (1995), Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems, Human Factors, 37 (1), 32—64.
Fiske, S. and Taylor, S.E. (1991). Social Cognition. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Fussell, S.R., Kraut, R.E., Gergle, D., and Setlock, L.D. (2005). Visual cues as evidence of others’ minds in collaborative physical tasks. In B.F. Malle and S.D. Hodges (Eds.), Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Divide Between the Self and Others, The Guilford Press, New York, NY, pp. 91—105.
Gilbert, D.T., Pelham, B.W., and Jones, E.E. (1987). Influence and interface: what the active perceiver overlooks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 (5), 861—870.
Gollwitzer, P.M. and Bargh, J.A. (1996). The Psychology of Action: Linking Cognition and Motivation to Behavior. New York, NY: Guilgord Press.
Gross, T., Stary, C., and Totter, A. (2005). User-centered awareness in computer-supported cooperative work-systems: Structured embedding of findings from social sciences. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 18 (3), 323—360.
Gutwin, C., Greenberg, S., and Roseman, M. (1996). Workspace awareness support with radar views. In Proceedings of CHI’96, ACM Press, New York, pp. 208—209.
Gutwin, C. and Greenberg, S. (2002). A descriptive framework of workspace awareness for real-time groupware. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 11, (3), 411—446.
Hastie, R. (1983). Social inference. Annual Review of Psychology, 34 (1), 511—542.
Heath, C. and Luff, P. (1992). Technology in Action. Cambridge University Press, UK.
Holmquist, L.E., Falk, J., and Wigström, J. (1999). Supporting group awareness with interpersonal awareness devices. Personal Technologies, 3 (1/2).
Isaacs, E., Walendowski, A. and Ranganthan, D. (2002). Hubbub: A sound-enhanced mobile instant messenger that supports awareness and opportunistic interactions. In Proceedings of CHI ’02, ACM Press, New York, pp. 179—186.
Jones, E. E. and Nisbett, R. E. (1972). The actor and the observer: divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior. In E. E. Jones, D. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, and B.INTtie;Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior. General Learning Press, Morristown, NJ, pp. 79—94.
Laurier, E. (2001). Why people say where they are during mobile phone calls. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19 (4), 485—504.
Marmasse, N., Schmandt, C., and Spectre, D. (2004). WatchMe: Communication and awareness between members of a closely-knit group. In Proceedings of UbiComp 2004, Springer, pp. 214—231.
Milewski, A.E., and Smith, T.M. (2000). Providing presence cues to telephone users. In Proceedings of CSCW’00, ACM Press, New York.
Moskowitz, G.B. (2004). Social Cognition: Understanding Self and Others. The Guilford Press, New York.
Nardi, B., Whittaker, S., and Bradner, E. (2000). Interaction and outeraction: Instant messaging in action. In Proceedings of CSCW’00, ACM Press, New York, pp. 79—88.
Neisser, U. (1976), Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology. WH Freeman, New York.
Oulasvirta, A. and Blom, J. (2008). Motivations in personalisation behavior. Interacting with Computers, 20 (1), 1—16.
Oulasvirta, A., Raento, M., and Tiitta, S. (2005). ContextContacts: Re-designing smart phone’s contact book to support mobile awareness and collaboration. In Proceedings of Mobile HCI 2005, ACM Press, New York, pp. 167—174.
Oulasvirta, A., Petit, R., Raento, M., and Tiitta, S. (2007). Interpreting and acting upon mobile awareness cues. Human-Computer Interaction, 22 (1), 97—135.
Reeve, J. (2001). Understanding Motivation and Emotion. Harcourt College, Orlando, FL.
Schank, R. and Abelson, R. (1977), Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures. Halsted Press division of Wiley [distributor].
Schmidt, K. (2002). The problem with “awareness”: Introductory remarks on “awareness in CSCW”. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11 (3—4), 285—298
Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3 (3), 417—457.
Sproull, L. and Kiesler, S. (1986). Reducing social context cues: Electronic mail in organizational communications. Management Science, 32 (11), 1492—1512.
Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Action: The Problem of Human—Machine Communication. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Tang, P. and Venables, T. (2000). Smart homes and telecare for independent living. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 6 (1), 8—14.
Tang, J.C., Yankelovich, N., Begole, J., Van Kleek, M., Li, F., and Bhalodia, J. (2001). ConNexus to Awarenex: extending awareness to mobile users. In Proceedings of CHI’01, ACM Press, New York, pp. 221—228.
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., and Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(5), 675—691.
Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 3—20.
Vallacher, R. and Wegner, D. (1985). A Theory of Action Identification. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ.
Weilenmann, A. (2003). I can’t talk now, I’m in a fitting room: formuling availability and location in mobile phone conversations. Environment and Planning, 35 (9), 1589—1605.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to express gratitude to Sampsa Hyysalo, Giulio Jacucci, Esko Kurvinen, Kari Kuutti, Jaakko Lehikoinen, Esko Lehtonen, Panos Markopoulos, Miikka Miettinen, Mika Raento, Mikko Salminen, and Sakari Tamminen for valuable feedback. Esko Lehtonen produced the figures in Section 5.5. This work has been funded by the 6th Framework Research Programme of the EU, through the projects PASION (FP-2004-IST-4-27654) and IPCity (FP-2004-IST-4-27571), as well as by the Academy of Finland project ContextCues.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag London Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Oulasvirta, A. (2009). Social Inference Through Technology. In: Markopoulos, P., De Ruyter, B., Mackay, W. (eds) Awareness Systems. Human-Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-477-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-477-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-84882-476-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-84882-477-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)