Publication Details
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Sarah Diefenbach, Lara Christoforakos, Daniel Ullrich
Moral debate or rebellion. The power of psychological reactance and its potential role in interaction design. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Workshop on Moral Agents for Sustainable Transitions. |
So-called "moral agents", here understood as agentic technology to support or initiate a desired behavior with a moral component (typically related to societal goals e.g., sustainability, health), open up an interesting dimension in human-technology relations. Technology is no longer a mere tool but rather acts as a social counterpart with its own position. From a psychological perspective, the question of whether the potential of Things plays out, and a human is willing to engage in the ethical debate offered by the moral agent, may depend on various factors of person, design, and context. Our position paper focuses on three interrelated aspects, which we would like to discuss and empirically explore in the CHI workshop and beyond: (1) technology's role as social counterpart, (2) human-experienced autonomy, and (3) reactance as a potential outcome, i.e., people refusing an attempt to be influenced and, instead, acting in an opposite way. |