Towards a Sociolinguistics-Based Framework for the Study of Politeness in Human-Computer Interaction

Politeness plays an important role in regulating communication and enhancing social interactions.Research suggests that people treat interactive systems as social agents and may expect those systems to exhibit polite behavior. We augment early research in this area by proposing a framework that is grounded in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. The framework focuses on two complementary concepts - clarity and politeness. We suggest that these concepts are pertinent to various domains of interactive technologies and provide examples for the applicability of clarity and politeness rules to human-computer interaction (HCI). We conducted a laboratory experiment, in which politeness and clarity served as independent factors in the context of a cooperative computer game, based on the Peekaboom game. The manipulation of clarity failed, yet politeness was manipulated successfully based on the framework's rules of politeness. The results provide empirical support for the basic propositions of the framework and may facilitate more systematic research on politeness in various domains of social computing and other areas related to HCI.