Can talking to a bot help you feel better?

an article by Ciara Byrne for Fast Company [brought to us by World of Psychology’s “Psychology Around the Net”]

Amid a growing crisis in addiction and mental health, tireless machines are offering a new form of care—and raising new questions.

One of the world’s first chatbots was a therapist. Built in 1964 by MIT researcher Jerome Weizenbaum, the program, called ELIZA, was designed to mimic techniques from Rogerian psychotherapy where the therapist prompts the patient to examine their own thoughts and feelings.

Weizenbaum gave the following example of a typical conversation with ELIZA:

– Men are all alike.

– IN WHAT WAY

– They’re always bugging us about something or other.

– CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE

– Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

– YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

– He says I’m depressed much of the time.

– I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED

– It’s true. I am unhappy.

– DO YOU THINK THAT COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY

– I need some help. That much seems certain.

ELIZA had no memory or understanding of the conversation. It merely searched for a keyword in the last sentence typed in by its interlocutor and calculated an answer using a rule associated with the keyword. Nevertheless, and much to Weizenbaum’s dismay, many users became convinced that ELIZA understood them.

“ELIZA created the most remarkable illusion of having understood in the minds of many people who conversed with it,” Weizenbaum reported. Users would often demand to be permitted to converse with the system in private. This phenomenon became known as the ELIZA effect. The era of the non-human listener had begun.

Continue reading