News by Subject Social & Behavior

Sorry, Siri, but just giving a chatbot a human name or adding humanlike features to its avatar might not be enough to win over a user if the device fails to maintain a conversational back-and-forth with that person, according to researchers. In fact, those humanlike features might create a backlash against less responsive humanlike chatbots.

Estimating tweet infectivity from the first 50 retweets is the key to predicting whether a tweet will go viral, according to a new study published in PLOS ONE on April 17, 2019, by Li Weihua from Beihang University, China and colleagues.

Screen time above a two-hour threshold at five years of age is associated with an increased risk of clinically relevant externalizing problems such as inattention, according to a study published April 17 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Piush Mandhane of the University of Alberta, and colleagues.

Charitable and humanitarian organizations are increasingly tapping into a $30 billion crowdfunding market, not only to raise funds but to build donors' trust by being more transparent, according to research from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

Comparing 20 instances of celebrity fat-shaming with women's implicit attitudes about weight before and after the event, psychologists from McGill University found that instances of celebrity fat-shaming were associated with an increase in women's implicit negative weight-related attitudes. They also found that from 2004-2015, implicit weight bias was on the rise more generally.

New study in Nature Communications finds increasingly narrow peaks of collective attention over time, supporting a 'social acceleration' occurring across different domains.

An international collaboration led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, AI, and computation will lead this century to the development of a "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" (B/CI), that connects neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud-computing networks in real time.

Data from more than 17,000 teenagers show little evidence of a relationship between screen time and well-being in adolescents. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming, or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health.