  Politeness plays an important role in regulating communication and enhancing
social interactions.Research suggests that people treat interactive systems as
social agents and may expect those systems to exhibit polite behavior. We
augment early research in this area by proposing a framework that is grounded
in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. The framework focuses on two complementary
concepts - clarity and politeness. We suggest that these concepts are pertinent
to various domains of interactive technologies and provide examples for the
applicability of clarity and politeness rules to human-computer interaction
(HCI). We conducted a laboratory experiment, in which politeness and clarity
served as independent factors in the context of a cooperative computer game,
based on the Peekaboom game. The manipulation of clarity failed, yet politeness
was manipulated successfully based on the framework's rules of politeness. The
results provide empirical support for the basic propositions of the framework
and may facilitate more systematic research on politeness in various domains of
social computing and other areas related to HCI.
