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jmc - There is a large amount of self-important puffery among the
author and the promoters of techpsych.  However, there may be a few
useful results.
n055  1338  20 Jan 85
BC-COMPUTER Undated 3takes
(Financial)
Peggy Schmidt is working on a book about the impact of technology on
people and their jobs.
By PEGGY SCHMIDT
c.1985 N.Y. Times News Service
    According to the International Data Corp. market researchers, nearly
12 million personal computers, terminals and word processors have
made it into offices across the country. And they are being cursed as
often as blessed. Users complain of eye strain and mental stress.
Managers question whether electronic messages are being used to the
detriment of personal interaction.
    Clearly, the growing computerization of the work force has brought
its own form of trauma. The machines can record every key stroke and
can spew forth productivity reports with the press of a button,
giving rise to workers' complaints that Big Brother is watching. They
can make some tasks so simple and repetitive that the boredom factor
negates any productivity gains that the task simplification might
have yielded. And computers can cause deep insecurity for workers who
simply do not catch on to their use as quickly as their peers appear
to.
    Late last year, an international symposium entitled ''Ancient Humans
in Tomorrow's Electronic World,'' held at the Aspen Institute for
Humanistic Studies, addressed the question of whether human beings
have the biological and social capabilities to adapt to the advanced
technological environment they are creating. The answer was yes - but
they need help.
    That help is starting to come, from a new field that is colloquially
referred to as ''tech psych.'' The practitioners of this new
discipline can be psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, computer
scientists, sociologists - or better still, some combination of the
above. They are attracted to the field because it represents fertile
ground for studying from a new perspective how humans think, behave
and communicate.
    Indeed, tech psychologists have twofold jobs. They identify
computer-caused problems in an office and offer solutions. And they
study how the computers are used in order to develop new theories
about the ways people think, with hopes of incorporating those
theories into the design of newer generations of computers.
    Tech psychologists can be found on quite disparate payrolls. Many
are employed by universities. Others have embarked on projects for
unions that want to identify those computer-related health, safety,
job security and quality-of-worklife issues that can be addressed in
bargaining sessions. And quite a few are employed by computer
manufacturers and software writers themselves. ''Ease of use is a
major concern now that managers and professionals with no computer
experience have adopted personal computers,'' said Susan Dray,
manager of human technology impacts at Honeywell Inc. Added Thomas
Moran, manager of user-system research at the Xerox Corp.'s Research
Center in Palo Alto, Calif., ''We're trying to make machines smarter
by studying the way people think.''
    The government, too, is getting into the act. Federal agencies such
as the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of
Occupational Safety and Health, have financed research. And the
Office of Technology Assessment, an advisory group to Congress, is
trying to identify issues in office automation that Congress may want
to consider.
    
    Tech psych is, in some respects, an offspring of the more
established field of ergonomics, or the study of human factors.
Ergonomists have worked in the microelectronics industry for years,
solving such ''knobs and dials'' problems as the placement of keys,
the brightness and color of screens and displays, and the location of
disk drives.
    But until recently, their primary goal was to design systems that
would be most efficient to use. Nowadays they are increasingly
looking for ways to build in features that not only make the systems
easier to use, but also more psychologically acceptable to users.
    For example, while lower-level employees using computers are more
likely to worry about the invasion of privacy that comes with the
computer's ability to monitor their performance, managers and
professionals are more concerned about accessability to the computer
data itself. For example, many are reluctant to use internal
electronic mail systems - systems that allow people to send and
receive messages via computer - because it seems too easy for anyone
with access to the computer to peak at someone else's messages.
    It was practitioners of tech psychology who suggested features that
allow users to ''lock up'' files that contain personal messages, or
to scramble messages. ''If a particular type of office technology
isn't used because it violates personal freedom or flies in the face
of corporate custom, it's just as important as a product failing for
engineering reasons,'' said Susan Dray, the Honeywell manager.
    Those tech psychologists who are interested in more esoteric studies
are using computers to discern how people actually organize their
thoughts - in hopes of then using that data to write software that
will in turn let computers help them with that organization.
    Moran of Xerox, for example, says that most people compose written
text by collecting ideas, committing them to memory or jotting them
down on paper, then forming them into a ''shoebox of mental or real
note cards,'' all of which are related to one another.The person then
sorts through the ideas to decide
which ones to use, the order in which they should be presented, and
how to express the relationships among them.
    In his current work, Moran says, ''We use text processing and data
management programs to help us quantify and measure the steps of the
composing process. But our findings may also eventually be used to
design sophisticated computer software that might help the person who
is formulating a written argument, for example, to construct a
framework for it, point out its weaknesses and advise him to check
certain sources.''
    
    ''When people are introduced to computers, many of them experience
the same alienation that people who move to foreign countries do,''
said Sara Kiesler, a professor of social psychology at
Carnegie-Mellon University. And like many foreign visitors, she said,
computer neophytes are put at ease when they run into people from
their own backgrounds.
    Thus, Professor Kiesler and other tech psychologists are urging
companies to put computer training into the hands of peers who have
undergone prior training, rather than hiring professional trainers or
sending would-be computer users back to school.
    ''If there's an overlap in the values of the teacher and the
student, it's less of a we-they type of relationship,'' explains
Professor Kiesler. ''That argues for secretaries training other
secretaries and managers training other managers.''
    However, adds Bonnie Johnson, a psychologist and office systems
planner at the Intel Corp., such informal training must take place
within a corporate culture that stresses learning. It will not work,
she warns, ''unless a company makes continuous training available to
employees and learning is given priority status by high-level
management.''
    If those two conditions do exist, the amount of training, both
formal and informal, will tend to have a snowballing effect. Miss
Johnson tells of an Intel manager who spurned the personal computer
the company gave him, preferring to do his financial spreadsheets and
memos by hand. His secretary then transferred the data onto the
computer.
    Although the manager claimed that he simply did not want to use the
computer, he actually was frightened that he would not be able to
absorb the new technology. Then he noticed that he was virtually the
only one in the department who was not actively using the computer -
and his reaction, as Miss Johnson recalls it, was if his peers could
learn it, he could, too.
    Even as some tech psychologists study the impact of peer pressure on
the spread of computer use, others study the exact reverse - that is,
the impact of computers on interoffice relations. The growing use of
electronic mail and computer conferencing, in which people ''meet''
by writing messages on computer terminals that automatically appear
on other people's terminals, has attracted any number of researchers.
''Gathering and dispersing information is the lifeblood of any
organization, which is what makes this topic so attractive,'' said
Susan Dray, the Honeywell manager of human technology impacts.
    One recent experiment, conducted by Professor Kiesler and several
Carnegie Mellon colleagues, turned up some rather surprising results
on the ways in which computers affect communications. Several
university administrators and managers from Pittsburgh companies were
put into groups of three, and asked to make such decisions as
choosing between two capital investments, one of which would deliver
a small but certain return, the other of which was a gamble that
offered a higher potential win.
    On half the problems, the groups were asked to use computers to
communicate; on the other half, they relied on conventional face to
face conversation. The researchers found that when they used the
computers, the participants used fewer words to discuss their points.
And they were less swayed by the idea of standing alone against the
other two people in the group. ''Social cues - tone of voice and
facial expressions - are absent,'' said Professor Kiesler. ''People
are more likely to make independent choices.''
    
    Ten years ago, Marilyn Mantei, then a recent college graduate,
wanted to take a graduate program in human-computer interaction. She
looked through countless university catalogues, yet could not find
one that offered such a course of study.
    Today Miss Mantei, who is an assistant professor of computer and
information systems at the University of Michigan's Graduate School
of Business Administration, counts more than 50 schools offering
doctorates in psychology, computer science or business, with an
emphasis on human-computer interaction, as tech psych is formally
called. What is more, she claims that the computer industry snaps the
graduates up as quickly as the schools spew them out. ''The demand
for Ph.D.s with psychology research skills who understand how
computer systems are designed is enormous,'' she said.
    Indeed, tech psychology's evolutionary path in education is
mirroring the path that computer science itself took. Not that long
ago, computer studies were offered only as a sub-discipline in the
mathematics or electrical engineering departments. Nowadays computer
science is a stand-alone specialty at hosts of schools.
    As of now, there are no undergraduate programs in tech psych
available. Most candidates for a doctorate with an emphasis in
human-computer interaction come with at least a rudimentary knowledge
of computer programming. And as part of their doctoral studies they
will take courses in psychology - both traditional and
business-oriented - as well as a sprinking of courses in ergonomics,
the study of human factors. The tech psych concentration normally
takes five to six years to achieve, and requires extensive field work
or lab research.
    The graduates wind up in various types of jobs. Those who are
skilled in computer science as well as in computer-human interaction
often do product design for hardware and software manufacturers.
Those who have stuck primarily to psychology also find a home with
the computer companies, generally doing research on user needs. And
graduates whose advanced degree was in the business area often help
companies that are computerizing to design systems and integrate them
into the offices.
    Academia has not yet formally acknowledged human-computer
interaction as a discipline worthy of its own full-blown doctorate,
but both the Human Factors Society, an association made up primarily
of psychologists, and the Association of Computing Machinery, a group
made up primarily of computer scientists, have given it a measure of
formal professional status. Both have formed sub-groups for members
with a special interest in human computer interaction. And those
members, insists Lorraine Borman, chairman of that Computing
Machinery Association's sub-group, already are making a major mark in
industry. ''The best evidence of that,'' she said, ''is the number of
companies who are naming our members heads of newly-created
departments that have human-computer interaction as their main
focus.''