{"id":554,"date":"2020-05-25T10:03:01","date_gmt":"2020-05-25T07:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/?p=554"},"modified":"2020-05-26T08:30:40","modified_gmt":"2020-05-26T05:30:40","slug":"is-the-human-service-employee-really-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/2020\/05\/25\/is-the-human-service-employee-really-human\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the human service employee really human?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

All of us have heard this several times: robots and artificial\nintelligence (AI) will replace many of us, and this also goes for service\nemployees who used to have face-to-face interaction with customers. Much\nresearch has already been carried out on what the new interfaces should be like\nto make us humans feel comfortable in our roles as customers. So far, one\nresult is particularly dominant: the more the interface can be made to resemble\na human, the more comfortable we feel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Such results stem from studies in which researchers\nhave measured customers\u2019 perceptions of humanness of robots and other agents as\nwell as customers\u2019 evaluations of them. And the typical result, \u201cwhat-is-humanlike-is-good\u201d,\nis one main reason why most AI-powered virtual agents are designed so that they\nhave a humanlike face, a name and a gender, and that they can talk to us in a\nconversation mode. In other words, human attributes have become a gold standard\nfor what the new, virtual entities should be like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If real humans are assessed in the same way as robots\nand virtual agents, in terms of perceived humanness, one may perhaps think that\nhumans would receive \u201cfull\u201d humanness scores. A human is<\/em> a human, right? However, after having seen the results of\ncopious studies in which participants were asked about how they perceive\nvarious humans in terms of humanness, and after having made some studies on\nthis issue myself, I have so far not found one single study in which real\nhumans received full humanness scores. In other words, perceived humanness is a\nvariable, not a dichotomy, and it rarely reaches its highest possible value\nwhen people are asked about the humanness of other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perceived humanness is a variable, not a dichotomy, and it rarely reaches its highest possible value when people are asked about the humanness of other people.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The main reason is probably that being human means\nhaving many characteristics related to an inner life \u2013 such as having agency, an\nability to experience emotions, and having a feeling for what is right and\nwrong \u2013 and these characteristics will never be fully accessible to others. So,\nno one can know for sure what it is to be me, and I cannot fully know what it\nis to be someone else. This is indeed an essential part of being human \u2013 and a\ntimeless source of pleasant surprises and disappointments.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any event, studies showing that real humans are typically denied full humanness by others are often made under the label of dehumanization. This is a malicious form of perceptual bias because it can lead to many horrible outcomes \u2013 such as genocide, torture, slavery, rape, and various forms of other anti-social behaviors. The main idea is something like this: if another person is not a full human, well, then we have a green light to do whatever we want with this person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lately, I have had a chance to see what happens if you move beyond those\ngroups that are studied in the dehumanization literature (homeless, migrants,\ndrug addicts etc.). More specifically, my idea was to examine customers\u2019\ninteractions with service employees through the lens of perceived humanness,\nand I wanted to know what would happen when customers are explicitly asked to\nassess service employees in term of perceived humanness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, for example, in one experiment I was inspired by the current corona\npandemic and the new norms for behavior it has generated. The design was such\nthat the participants were encountering a female grocery store employee who\nexisted in two versions. In one version, she violated the norms for what is\nappropriate social behavior during a pandemic by coughing into the air and by\nneglecting social distancing; in the other version, she followed the norms.\nWith this design, then, the participants were randomly allocated to\nencountering one of the two employee versions, and after the encounter I asked questions\nabout their reactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not so surprising, the norm-violating employee was dehumanized \u2013 in the\nsame way as migrants, garbage collectors, and homeless people have been in\nother studies. This part of the results should be seen in the light of people\u2019s\ngeneral sensitivity to whatever is signaling disease; if there is a suspicion\nthat someone is infected, we typically react with avoidance and disgust (and\ndehumanization). More surprising, however, is what happened to the participants\nwho were exposed to the norm-complying employee \u2013 because this employee was\ndehumanized, too. Presumably, one reason is that decades of exposure to the\nidea that \u201cthe customer is king\u201d can devaluate those who have a service role. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The take-away, I believe, is this: So much attention has been devoted to making non-human entities more humanlike that we may have forgotten that we humans typically are subject to a humanness deficit in the eyes of others. And this is far from optimal when a \u201cwhat-is-humanlike-is-good\u201d mechanism is operating. The service firm in which human employees will still interact with (human) customers, then, should be mindful of what is boosting the perceived humanness of human employees. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Magnus S\u00f6derlund<\/a><\/em>
Professor of Marketing and Head of the Center for Consumer Marketing (CCM), Stockholm School of Economics
Senior Fellow Researcher at CERS, Hanken<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: Unsplash<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All of us have heard this several times: robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will replace many of us, and this also goes for service employees who used to have face-to-face […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[35,64,15,29,38,39],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cers-blog","tag-ai","tag-humanness","tag-marketing","tag-research","tag-robotics","tag-service"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":558,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions\/558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}