UBCCRU Individual Differences
In the past two decades computers have become an important part of many peoples' lives, both at home and work. For much of this time work has been ongoing at Bolton which aims to further knowledge about how people's attitudes and behaviours concerning computers vary, and while doing this a secondary aim has been to develop psychometric instruments that will be of use to other researchers who also seek to explore these areas. Research has been carried out in a number of inter-related areas by John Charlton, who is the unit's main researcher in this area.
Computing-related engagement and addictions
This work stemmed from John's PhD studies of the educational performance of computing students. Since at the time that this work started the major area of interest for psychologically-orientated studies of computing behaviour was computer anxiety, it was necessary to develop a scale measuring highly positive attitudes towards computers, therefore the Computer Apathy and Anxiety scale was developed (Charlton & Birkett, 1995)| which included measures of computer apathy - engagement (a continuum running from apathy towards computers at one end to non-pathological but highly positive attitudes towards computers at the other end) and computer anxiety. Using this scale it was shown that computer engagement was a predictor of computing students' performance on higher education courses (Charlton & Birkett, 1999)| and that students on programming-orientated courses were more highly computer engaged than students on business-orientated courses (Charlton & Birkett, 1998)|. Finally, using measures of psychological gender, a study showed that both greater masculinity and femininity were related to greater computer comfort (i.e. lower anxiety), that masculinity rose as computer engagement rose, and that more feminine people tended to have fewer problems with over-use of computers. As far as biological sex was concerned, this study showed that males and females did not differ with respect to computer comfort and engagement, but that males were more prone to over-use computers. The results of this study were interesting in that they seemed to show that the previous situation in which studies had found females to be more computer anxious might be on the wane, this being attributed to the increasing number of computing applications that made females find computers useful and enjoyable compared to the situation that existed in the early years of mass computer availability (Charlton, 1999)|.
The over-use findings in the Charlton and Birkett (1999)| paper were of some relevance to debates concerning computer addiction that were emerging around this time. Here, with the rise of the internet and the increasing use of computer games, the idea that some people might be developing behavioural addictions became prominent, and many studies began appearing which studied these phenomena. However, some of these studies appeared to confuse symptoms that appear to signal mere high engagement with those that genuinely signalled addiction, and the possibility that the prevalence of computing-related addictions was being over-estimated arose. To investigate these possibilities, a factor analytic study was performed (Charlton, 2002)| and this confirmed these ideas with respect to computing in general. Specifically, it was argued that factor analytic results showed that the criteria of conflict, withdrawal, behavioural salience and relapse and reinstatement can be considered core characteristics of computing-related addictions, but that tolerance, euphoria and cognitive salience are at least as characteristic, if not more characteristic, of high engagement than of addiction with respect to computing activities. A follow-up study with Ian Danforth (formerly of Whitman College, USA), verified this with respect to a specific type of Massively Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Game ((MMORPG) called Asheron's Call (Charlton & Danforth, 2007)|. A sequel to this latter paper, focusing on the personalities of Asheron's Call players, has shown that scores on a psychometric index of addiction to Asheron's Call are negatively related to extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, intellect and attractiveness, and positively related to negative valence, but that, apart from a negative relationship for extraversion, minimal relationships exist between personality variables and scores on a psychometric index of Asheron's Call engagement. The data also suggested that people who might be at risk of addiction to activities such as the playing of MMORPGs may be characterized by Asperger's syndrome-like personality traits. (Charlton & Danforth, submitted).
Computing control motivations and perceptions
This strand of research arose because it was thought that the concept of desire for control (e.g. Burger, 1992) might be useful in accounting for both individual differences in tendencies to become behaviourally addicted to certain computing activities, and in researching computer-related anger (see below). Since it is generally recognised that specific psychometric measures are better predictors than more general predictors, and there was no computing-specific measure of desire for control (i.e. control motivations), it was necessary to design such a measure. It was also considered possible that computing locus of control (i.e. control perceptions) might be an important individual difference variable in explaining computer-related anger. Again, given the fact that there had previously been a large amount of work using general measures of locus of control in studies of computing-related behaviours and attitudes, but that no computing-specific locus of control measure had previously been developed, an attempt was made to develop such a measure. The resulting instrument, the Computing Control Scale contains a short computing need for control subscale and a computing autonomy subscale. This latter subscale constitutes a measure of a hybrid construct involving confidence in controlling computers and the extent to which people display self-reliance in their interactions with computers (Charlton, 2005)|. An important conclusion of this work was that it may be difficult to construct a computing-specific measure of locus of control because generally the vast majority of people believe that in principle outcomes of interactions with computers are within their control (i.e. people have an internal locus of control with respect to such outcomes), assuming that they have the required knowledge.
Computing anger and ethopoeic perceptions of computers
Recent studies at Bolton have begun to focus on computing anger. Although, anecdotally, anger when computing is a common phenomenon, there is surprisingly little research. Our work in this area, conducted with Arvid Kappas of Jacobs University Bremen, has compared computing anger with (the more commonly researched) driving anger within the context of appraisal theory (e.g. Smith & Lazurus, 1993). This work has shown that computing anger is almost as common as driving anger. Also, for both types of activity, as a group, all three appraisal components (motivational relevance, motivational incongruence and other accountability) that are taken by Smith and Lazarus to be central in the generation of anger were shown to be predictive of anger intensity while theoretically non-central components were not. Although not predicted by theory, need to communicate anger to the computer was shown to augment the predictivity of appraisal variables in computing situations. Findings also suggested that ongoing stress plays a more important role in computing anger than in driving anger, and that other blame is greater in incidents of driving anger while self blame and machine blame are greater in incidents of computing anger (Charlton & Kappas, submitted). It is useful to note that computing need for control, as measured by the Computing Control Scale (Charlton, 2005) was not found to be predictive of computing anger in this study.
In order to further our research into computing anger a short measure of ethopoeic perceptions of computers has been developed (Charlton, 2006)|. Ethopoeia (from the Greek ethos meaning character, and poeia meaning representation) is the term that has been used by Clifford Nass and his colleagues (e.g. Nass & Moon, 2000) to describe the notion that while people often respond to computers as though they were human, people realise that computers do not merit such responses. These responses are said to result from computers triggering scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1976) that would usually only be appropriate for human-human interaction. These scripts are said to be triggered because many of the cues that occur in interactions between humans also occur in human-computer interactions (e.g. the use of words to communicate, and the interactive nature of the communication). We aim to use the short instrument that we have developed to investigate the extent to which ethopoeic perceptions of computers are involved in both the differential attribution of blame to computers for anger inducing computing incidents and the degree to which the anger resulting from such incidents causes overt expression of anger towards computers.
References
Burger, J.M. (1992). Desire for control. New York: Plenum.
Charlton, J.P. (1999). Biological sex, sex-role identity and the spectrumof computing orientations: A re-appraisal at the end of the 90s. Journal of Educational Computing Research,21(4), 393-412.
Charlton, J.P. (2002). A factor-analytic investigation of computer 'addiction' and engagement. British Journal of Psychology, 93, 329–344.
Charlton, J.P. (2005). Measuring perceptual and motivational facets of computer control: The development and validation of the Computing Control Scale. Computers in Human Behavior, 21, 791-815.
Charlton, J.P., & Birkett, P.E. (1995). The development and validation of the Computer Apathy and Anxiety Scale. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 13, 41-59.
Charlton, J.P., & Birkett, P.E. (1998). Psychological characteristics of students taking programming-oriented and applications-oriented computing courses.Journal of Educational Computing Research, 18(2), 163-182.
Charlton, J.P., & Birkett, P.E. (1999). An integrative model of factors related to computing course performance.Journal of Educational Computing Research, 20(3), 237-257.
Charlton, J.P., & Danforth, I.D.W. (2007). Distinguishing addiction and high engagement in the context of online game playing. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, 1531-1548.
Charlton, J.P., & Danforth, I.D.W. (submitted). The playing of online games: Personality, addiction, engagement and usage.
Charlton, J.P., & Kappas, A. (submitted). Comparing appraisals of driving-related and computing-related anger.
Charlton, J.P. (2006). How human is your computer? Measuring ethopoeic perceptions of computers. In K. Morgan, C.A. Brebbia, & J.M. Spector (Eds.), The Internet Society II: Advances in Education, Commerce & Governance (pp. 167-176). Southampton: WIT Press.
Nass, C. & Moon, Y. (2000). Machines and mindlessness: Social responses to computers. Journal of Social Issues, 56(1), 81-103.
Schank, R.C. & Abelson, R., (1976). Scripts, plans, goals and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Smith, C.A., & Lazarus, R.S. (1993). Appraisal components, core relational themes, and the emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 7, 233-269.