Attitudes toward Technology and Technology-Free Environments: An Empirical and Theoretical Investigation of the User Experience

In recent decades, with the rapid advancement of technology, it has become an integral part of our daily lives. In efforts to understand the factors influencing people’s willingness to use technology, numerous variables have been proposed that may affect the motivation to adopt it. At the same time, various theoretical models have been developed to explain how the experience of using technology is formed.The aim of the present study is to examine the relationship between attitudes toward technology and attitudes toward technology-free situations. To this end, attitudes toward different types of environments were measured using questionnaires.The experiment examined the relationship between attitudes toward a new technological human resources system and attitudes toward the old, non-technological system.The study’s findings indicate a negative (statistically nonsignificant) relationship between attitudes toward the old system and attitudes toward the new system—a result consistent with previous findings.The discussion presents two possible explanatory approaches to the experience occurring during technology use. According to the first approach, the experience arises only when the particles composing the neurons assume finite and fixed values; prior to that, only the probability of their values can be estimated, and thus the experience is not yet conscious, although the information is stored in long-term memory. In contrast, the alternative approach holds that the experience is based on the retrieval of previous examples stored in memory — meaning that the experience is a reconstruction of one of those examples.