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Our Aversion to A/B Testing on Humans Is Dangerous
Research suggests that people have an irrational aversion to A/B tests, which could limit the extent to which important institutions like hospitals, legislatures, and corporations base their decisions on objective evidence.Photograph by Fernando Cortes / Shutterstock Facebook once teamed up with scientists at Cornell to conduct a now-infamous experiment on emotional contagion. Researchers randomly assigned […] -
How Social Media Exploits Our Moral Emotions
Companies profit from the pleasure we feel in expressing righteous outrage. -
Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google?
On Twitter, in a thread that went viral, François Chollet, an A.I. software engineer at Google, argued, “Facebook is, in effect, in control of your political beliefs and your worldview.”Photograph by Joe Penniston / Flickr Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and C.E.O. of Facebook, admitted recently his company knew, in 2015, that the data firm Cambridge […] -
Why We Love to Blame 2016
You may have noticed it by now: the—I guess I’ll call it an impulse—to anthropomorphize “2016.” It began gradually. First, we objectified it, likening it to a disturbing film, a force of nature, broken hardware. As Slate put it:In trying to wrap our heads around 2016’s all-reason-and-logic–defying onslaught of tragedy and absurdity, we objectified the […] -
Is Facebook Luring You Into Being Depressed?
Social media encourages us to follow those we envy.
