The „Social Psychology: Media and Communication“ team has been advancing research in the area of human-technology-interaction for almost 20 years. The research encompasses both, computer-mediated-communication and human-technology-interactions (aka human-computer-interaction, HCI), thereby focusing not only how technologies and applications such as the Internet and social media affect people’s interaction with each other (e.g. relationship building, opinion formation) but also how humans react to the technology itself. With regard to the latter, different entities such as virtual agents, robots, voice assistants and various forms of AI-systems have been examined.

The list below gives an overview on phenomena, technology, application areas and (vulnerable) groups studied. We employ and advance various theories related to social and media psychology as well as communication studies (e.g., motivated reasoning, Computers-as-social-actors paradigm, credibility research, persuasion theories (e.g., ELM), protection motivation theory). Methods are manifold but comprise mainly experimental (online) designs, longitudinal surveys, interviews and focus groups.

Phenomena

• Disinformation
• (calibrated) trust
• Privacy
• Microtargeting
• Effects of Bots

Technology

• CMC technologies
  • Social networking sites
  • Messenger Services
  • Online Games
• HCI technologies
  • Virtual agents
  • Robots
  • Voice assistants
  • AI-systems (e.g. decision support systems)

Application areas

• Science communication
• Education
• Medicine

Specific/vulnerable groups

• Children
• Cognitively impaired user groups
• Gender
• Age