Do humans apply human-human scripts to AI interactions?

The original CASA (Computers Are Social Actors) framework posited that humans mindlessly apply human-human social scripts to interactions with computers. When a computer has "enough" social cues, people treat it like a person — assigning personality traits, applying stereotypes, making social judgments — even though they know it's not human.

The extended CASA challenges this. Through decades of increasing interaction with media agents, humans have developed and now mindlessly apply scripts specific to media-agent interaction. The evidence: longitudinal studies show that responses to social cues change systematically upon repeated interactions with media agents (Baxter et al., 2017; Bickmore & Picard, 2005; Kim & Lim, 2019). The changed responses are systematic, suggesting that the new media-derived scripts are applied just as mindlessly as the original human-human ones.

This matters because it explains counterintuitive findings. If CASA were simply correct, people should always treat AI exactly like humans. But they don't — they have different initial expectations for media agents (Edwards, 2018), different response patterns, different thresholds for social engagement. These aren't refutations of CASA but evidence of a second script system that coexists with human-human scripts.

The practical implication for AI design is substantial. Since Does conversational style actually make AI more trustworthy?, the question becomes: which scripts are being activated? If users have media-specific scripts, then designing AI to mimic human conversation may be suboptimal. The extended CASA suggests researchers should "avoid reifying face-to-face communication as the gold standard" and explore why communication with a media agent may be preferred over communication with a human for certain tasks.

The MASA (Media Are Social Actors) paradigm formalizes this further: every media technology has at least some potential to evoke social responses (P1), and it is the combination of social cues, social signals, individual factors, and contextual factors that determines the response (P2). Social responses can occur with either mindless or mindful processing (P8) — unifying the anthropomorphism and mindlessness explanations.