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Nudges, small design changes that can markedly affect individual behavior, have been catching on. These techniques rely on insights from behavioral science

when used ethically, they can be very helpful. But we need to be sure that they aren’t being employed to sway people to make bad decisions that they will later regret.

Three principles should guide the use of nudges:■ All nudging should be transparent and never misleading.■ It should be as easy as possible to opt out of the nudge, preferably with as little as one mouse click.■ There should be good reason to believe that the behavior being encouraged will improve the welfare of those being nudged.

Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)

it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.

Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing

one theme emerges from the media coverage of people's relationships with our current set of technologies: Consumers want digital willpower. App designers in touch with the latest trends in behavioral modification--nudging, the quantified self, and gamification--and good old-fashioned financial incentive manipulation, are tackling weakness of will. They're harnessing the power of payouts, cognitive biases, social networking, and biofeedback. The quantified self becomes the programmable self.

the trend still has multiple interesting dimensions

Individuals are turning ever more aspects of their lives into managerial problems that require technological solutions. We have access to an ever-increasing array of free and inexpensive technologies that harness incredible computational power that effectively allows us to self-police behavior everywhere we go. As pervasiveness expands, so does trust.

We are hurried and distracted and don’t pay close attention to what we are doing. Often, we turn over our data in exchange for a deal we can’t refuse.

his research argues that when it comes to privacy, policy makers should carefully consider how people actually behave. We don’t always act in our own best interest, his research suggests. We can be easily manipulated by how we are asked for information. Even something as simple as a playfully designed site can nudge us to reveal more of ourselves than a serious-looking one.

“His work has gone a long way in trying to help us figure out how irrational we are in privacy related decisions,” says Woodrow Hartzog, an assistant professor of law who studies digital privacy at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. “We have too much confidence in our ability to make decisions.”

scientists are still debating exactly when and where the ancient bond originated

agree that they evolved from ancient wolves

he essence of the idea is that people actively bred wolves to become dogs just the way they now breed dogs to be tiny or large, or to herd sheep.

Since 2006, Michael Puett has taught an undergraduate survey course at Harvard University on Chinese philosophy, examining how classic Chinese texts are relevant today. The course is now one of Harvard’s most popular, third only to “Introduction to Computer Science” and “Principles of Economics.”

So-called Confucianism, for example, is read as simply being about forcing people to accept their social roles, while so-called Taoism is about harmonizing with the larger natural world. So Confucianism is often presented as bad and Taoism as good. But in neither case are we really learning from them.

we shouldn’t domesticate them to our own way of thinking. When we read them as self-help, we are assuming our own definition of the self and then simply picking up pieces of these ideas that fit into such a vision

When you walk or drive in the UK, you’re being nudged by dozens of hidden messages embedded in the roads and pavements.

He suffers from a rare inherited condition that leaves him only able to make out vague colour contrasts around him. Yet he is able to safely pick his way through the hectic city streets, thanks to dozens of hidden messages embedded in our roads and pavements that few of us even notice are there.

This subtle form of communication is not just confined to the pavement, either: increasingly, motorists and cyclists are also unknowingly being told what to do.

democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories

Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them.

Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of "evidence" that they proudly present to potential recruits.

eproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true

With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.

any hypotheses already start with a high chance of being wrong

Roman Jakobson, a linguist, once said that “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” How do two-pronoun systems play into

this? In German, I must choose du or Sie every time I address someone. According to the logic of language shaping thought, I should therefore be more aware of social relations when I speak German.

A believer in the language-shapes-thought idea might argue that speaking German doesn't push me to always be more conscious of social relationships because I'm a non-native speaker, and so I haven't developed the habits of mind of lifelong German speakers. But plenty of native speakers of two-pronoun languages find this system irksome and awkward, just as I do.

It is almost as though we have forgotten the matchless healing power of relationships, a power that I can attest to, since I have been on the couch for almost 45 years with the same person.

Still, it was her warmth and consistency as much as her illuminations that were nudging me away from my puppetlike relation to my impulses.

To her mind, it was good that our relationship was that deep and strong. To my mind, too.

In an Austrian laboratory, a team of scientists has grown three-dimensional models of embryonic human brain

“Even the most complex organ—the human brain—can start to form without any micro-manipulation.”

Knoblich cautioned that the organoids are not “brains-in-a-jar.” “We’re talking about the very first steps of embryonic brain development, like in the first nine weeks of pregnancy,” he said. “They’re nowhere near an adult human brain and they don’t form anything that resembles a neuronal network.”

New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.

"Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions."

many modern thinkers and scholars have agreed that all language is at root metaphorical.

in a self-report questionnaire completed by more than 80,000 American adults, self-control ranked lowest among 24 strengths of character.

three out of four parents said they thought self-control has declined in the past half-century.

Without a time machine that allows us to travel backward and compare Americans from different decades on the same self-control measures, we can’t be sure. Indeed, the scant scientific evidence on the question suggests that if anything, the capacity to delay gratification may be increasing.

Why would anyone continue to use recreational drugs despite the medical consequences and social condemnation? What makes someone eat more and more in the face of poor health?

modern humans have designed the perfect environment to create both of these addictions.

Drug exposure also contributes to a loss of self-control. Dr. Volkow found that low D2 was linked with lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, which would impair one’s ability to think critically and exercise restraint

Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

“It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”

most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.

An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.

“The prophets have said Trump is anointed,” she texted me once. “God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries… We are in a war between good & evil.”

By 2020, I’d pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. We’d spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trump’s cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before It’s News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of “the liberal media,” a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.

And West Virginia upped the ante, adding the chance to win hunting rifles or shotguns.

Governors across the country are resorting to almost shameless incentives to lure Americans who haven’t gotten a coronavirus vaccine to willingly take a jab.

Businesses, too, have stepped in to nudge the unvaccinated. The percentage of a state’s population that has been vaccinated varies dramatically. Some states are approaching 70%, and others are still below 50%.

Information disorder in current information ecosystems arises not only from the publication of “fake news,” but also from individuals' subjective reading of news and from their propagating news to others. Sometimes the difference between real and fake information is apparent. However, often a message is written to evoke certain emotions and opinions by taking partially true base stories and injecting false statements such that the information looks realistic. In addition, the perception of the trustworthiness of news is often influenced by confirmation bias. As a result, people often believe distorted or outright incorrect news and spread such misinformation further. For example, it was shown that in the months preceding the 2016 American presidential election, organizations from both Russia and Iran ran organized efforts to create such stories and spread them on Twitter and Facebook (Cohen, 2018). It is therefore important to raise internet users' awareness of such practices. Key to this is providing users with means to understand whether information should be trusted or not.

In this section, we discuss how social networks increase the spread of biased news and misinformation. We discuss confirmation bias, echo chambers and other factors that may subconsciously influence a person's opinion. We show how these processes can interact to form a vicious circle that favors the rise of untrustworthy sources. Often, when an individual thinks they know something, they are satisfied by an explanation that confirms their belief, without necessarily considering all possible other explanations, and regardless of the veracity of this information. This is confirmation bias in action. Nickerson (1998) defined it as the tendency of people to both seek and interpret evidence that supports an already-held belief.