In winter 2025, Ph.D. candidate Elise Duffau co-authored the article “Expecting politeness: Perceptions of voice assistant politeness” in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. For fifty years, politeness researchers claimed that some politeness forms show camaraderie (“Let’s go get lunch”) and some show distance (“If it’s not too much trouble, want to get lunch together?”). Researchers assessed how people interpreted these forms and found that many claims were wrong. They also discovered that politeness perception is affected by the activity in which communicators are engaged in (such as a social game or an instructional task) and whether people believed they were communicating with a person or an artificial agent.