Numerous scholars study how to design evidence-based interventions that can improve the lives of individuals, in a way that also brings social benefits. However, within the behavioral sciences in general, and the persuasive technology field specifically, scholars rarely focus-on, or report the negative outcomes of behavior change interventions, and possibly fewer report a special type of negati...

During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, sought the assistance of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists to establish an assessment program for evaluating candidates for the OSS. The assessment team developed a novel and rigorous program to evaluate OSS candidates. It is described in Assessment of Men: Selection of Personn...

This paper investigates the extent to which strategic objectives of the U.S. government influenced news coverage during the latter part of the Cold War (1976-88). We establish two reduced form relationships: 1) strategic objectives of the U.S. government causes the State Department to under-report human rights violations of political allies; and 2) these objectives reduce news coverage of human...

[...] Anyone capable of glimpsing the changes we have lived through in our own lives can see that Freudianism, however misunderstood it has been and however nebulous its consequences have been, constitutes an intangible but radical revolution. There is no need to go seeking witnesses to the fact: everything that concerns not just the human sciences, but the destiny of man, politics, metaphysics...

The development ofChina’s online game industry provides an example of the interaction of new technologies and politics in the commercialization and globalization of China’s cultural economy. The analysis of online games about China’s Resistance War against Japan (1937–1945) highlights the interplay of the state’s political agenda, business interests, and nationalistic sentiments as online games...

Sex education is supposed to provide young people with knowledge and understanding but much of its seems to be moral propaganda with a thin veneer of liberality.

To understand what it means to design ‘persuasive technology’, one probably needs to understand it in relation to design in general. Using examples from a variety of areas of design discourse, the first part of the paper presents the idea that design is inherently persuasive. Following a discussion of what this might imply to the identification of ‘persuasive design’ as an emerging research are...

An assessment of Herman and Chomsky’s 1988 five-filter propaganda model suggests it is mainly valuable for identifying areas in which researchers should look for evidence of collaboration (whether intentional or otherwise) between mainstream media and the propaganda aims of the ruling establishment. The model does not identify methodologies for determining the relative weight of independent fil...