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DarkTreader t1_iw387um wrote

Reply to comment by redduif in New psychology research finds people feel more attached to gendered technology by nikan69

I don’t think it’s the prevailing opinion that navigation voices are “commanding”. While they aren’t timidly saying “would you please turn right?” They are being assistants. You initially ask the device to give you directions, thus freeing you up to concentrate on operating the vehicle. You are delegating, you are in charge, and the voice is giving clear instructions as a helper but in no way do most people consider these commands. If you miss the turn it recalculates and gives you new directions. You are free to ignore them. They are clearly subservient to you in operation so I believe your perception, while perfectly valid for you, is in the minority and navigation is by no means designed to be a commander but an assistant. If they felt any more forceful people would less likely to use them.

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redduif t1_iw3jvh6 wrote

I wrote a whole reply to this but frankly the original study being behind paywall this article might not represent it properly, so I scrapped that.

To illustrate "If they owned a gendered technology item, participants felt more attached to the item. Gendered items also led to more negative stereotypical thinking about gender."

What does that even mean?

"The researchers acknowledge that the participants were all from the United States, and it is possible that these results may not apply in all cultures where gendered technology is present".

I sought for this information indeed, because they talked about cars.
A car in french is female, in dutch it's male although one wouldn't know without a dictionary.
In Spanish it is male.
While they specify geographical location, the article doesn't specify native or even secundary language.

A prominent vacuum robot is called Roomba.
The 'a' may suggest it's rather female.

So before going in a whole discussion of gender perception, I'd need to read the premise of the study.
This article to me suggests they started out with some negative suppositions, which could bias the conclusions, and participants speaking other languages may have an influence on their perception of gendered objects as English is one of the very few gender neutral languages.
Although it's rather mothership for exemple, so it exists unofficially for some words.
And while mustang had Boss they also had Shelby, being quite the cool car in several movies, so what does that mean in their affection yet negativity conclusion ?

While in a way one could argue negative publicity is also publicity, just based on this article I'm not convinced there is any link to gender perception of objects and the reason to buy that object or not.

Especially since assistant voices are often a choice on each product rather than having to choose male female or neutral beforehand.

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DarkTreader t1_iw3osg4 wrote

All this is good, I’m merely disputing your statement in the second paragraph that directions are “commands”. I think this is important to your thesis because you believe the article made some unsupported assertion while your statement about directions being commands i believe commits the same error. Everything else I have no dispute with.

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moutnmn87 t1_iw5b1i6 wrote

Im not sure being more forceful would make people less likely to use assistant apps . Both my girlfriend and I would choose pick a grumpy sailor mouth voice for the hos of that was an option.

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