Transfer of Controllability Expectations to Independent Others: Why Repeated Control of a Responsive Device Might Change What a Person Expects of People

This conceptual paper proposes Transfer of Controllability Expectations to Independent Others, a possible causal mechanism in which repeated control of a responsive environment supplies an expectation of immediate, complete compliance. Applied to people, that expectation may make their independent purposes, conditions, or refusals appear obstructive. The account asks whether an expectation formed with a tool applies to a person with separate commitments and circumstances. It treats this transfer as a testable psychological possibility. Tool use and irritation alone do not establish the connection, and other explanations for a person’s response require examination. The discussion connects the proposal to Reeves and Nass’s account of social responses to media, while examining a possible transfer in the opposite direction. It reads Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt as a literary illustration of children treating a parent’s refusal as an obstruction after living with a responsive house. The fictional events do not establish an empirical effect, and the mechanism does not predict the story’s violent ending. Part of the Shared Capacity and Learning series within On Human Modeling, the paper examines expectations of control and recognition of others’ autonomy. Its framework can inform human–AI research on whether and under what conditions expectations formed with responsive systems carry into human relationships.