Digital Ethics

We evolved to want variable rewards. What happens when smartphones give them to us?

Google knows nearly everything about you, from how you commute to your relationship status. There have never been more opportunities for marketers to exploit that data.

Just wow. The biggest murmuration of starlings I have ever seen. What a treat. pic.twitter.com/kFnaIDJ61v— Ricky Martin (@RexMartin) December 28, 2018

1998 "Don't get in a car with strangers" 2008: "Don't meet people from the internet alone." 2018: UBER Order yourself a stranger from the internet to get into a car with alone HEY from Imgur tagged as Being alone Meme

To truly achieve inclusiveness, we need to first look at who we’re excluding.

We can exploit the platform’s failings to reclaim our humanity

We asked teachers, professors, a psychiatrist and a technologist for their thoughts, and we heard a range of opinions on one of the most "weirdly divisive" issues in education.

I don’t want to brag, but I’m really good at sleeping. I close my eyes and fall asleep in about 45 seconds. I wake up eight hours later, no interruptions. Once, I read a Reddit thread about how sl

With toys for children that declare their love and want to chat, we bring to life a longstanding fantasy that machines might be our companions, that they might seem to not only be smart, but also to care about us.

Let me begin with a prescriptive statement: major social media companies ought to consult with trained social researchers to design interfaces, implement policies, and understand the implications o…

As a designer I’ve spent the last decade translating human needs and desires into experiences that fulfill them, and I’m convinced : the…

The case against empathy.

Company acknowledges ‘passive’ consumption of material can make people ‘feel worse’ but argues more engagement could improve wellbeing

The last year has demonstrated a sea change in design, as designers have created products that serve our deepest needs, rather than exploit them.

It's a way of quantifying a friendship, and it has a dark side.

Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, gave me a candid insider's look at how social networks purposely hook and potentially hurt our brains.

In experience design, friction is usually the opposite of being intuitive or effortless. However, that doesn't mean that it's always bad for the users. In this article, you'll learn when and how friction can be an efficient tool to actually design better experiences.

Data science seems to be computer people trying to do social sciences without learning the foundations of our scientific approaches.— Laura Linda Laugwitz (@lauralindal) November 6, 2017

Today’s guest is a repeat visitor to the show whose last episode proved to be one of our most popular. Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke Un

Once in a while we feel the need to write about an uncomfortable feeling that's been niggling us. This post is one. It expresses a discomfort we have about so-called

Over the past few decades, the boundaries between the public (government), private (business), and social (non-profit) sectors have been blurring as many pionee

Self-determination theory (SDT) is a macro theory of human motivation and personality that concerns people's inherent growth tendencies and innate psychological needs. It is concerned with the motivation behind choices people make without external influence and interference. SDT focuses on the degree to which an individual's behavior is self-motivated and self-determined.[1][2][3]

You can build it, but should you?

A while back I wrote something which made a number of people angry: Any new social structure must throw off surplus that people can live on, and that surplus must not be able to be bought up by the old system, which will seek to do so. The ban against selling out/being bought out must be irrational and ideological. Rational people

“What can we help you with today?”

Researchers watch publishers watching you, ignore privacy settings, run over mere HTTP

"The Influential Mind" introduces less-than-intuitive tactics for changing beliefs and behaviors.

A data collection service called SafeGraph collected 17 trillion location markers for 10 million smartphones during the holiday last year.