CASA, WASA, and the dimensions of us
In this paper we replicate and extend the work of the Computers are Social Actors (CASA) researchers who repeatedly found evidence that humans treat computers with typical social norms as if they were humans. We performed a between-subjects 22 factorial experiment to test our hypotheses as well as an exploratory factor analysis to further refine and validate a construct which measures politeness. We retest the CASA hypothesis and found that our new hypothesis  Websites are Social Actors (WASA) reduces the CASA effect in contexts where individuals form a social attachment to websites instead of computers. We found evidence that suggests humans can exhibit politeness toward websites and literally (not virtually) treat them as social actors. Finally, we tease out the elements of politeness as a construct and identify the key items in the instrument for data reduction, and initiate efforts towards establishing reliability and construct validity. As we shall see, the results of an exploratory factor analysis are quite consistent to recent research in social cognition, and suggest that the politeness construct may be tapping similar and fundamental components of how humans engage with others in their social world.
computers are social actors (casa) politeness websites humancomputer interaction