maetl

Psychology

Social Signaling in Connective Words

Structural words and turns of phrase are used as social signals that carry key information about the relationship between the parties involved in a discussion.

Mad Lib Forms

The only “right” approach is tweaking a design based on a feedback loop of observation.

Incentives Invite Abuse

Rethink the expectation that people will use a service for that which it is intended.

Windows into the Mind

“Just as soon as we begin to hone the ability to communicate through images it is stripped away from us.”

Gateway Drugs are Abject Nonsense

Narrow-minded fools who are unable to face the wider social problems of their society will always look to externalize the issue in an object.

Twitter The Wave

Is the popularity of Twitter best explained using the psychology of addiction and gambling?

Fun is no longer a priority

What US Game Developers Need to Know about Free-to-Play in China.

Social Traction

The explosion of conversation-driven web applications in today’s world is a sign of technology beginning to fold in upon itself.

Game Changing

How video games trained a generation of athletes.

Iterating Short Texts

How to make short text messages more effective.

Understanding Uncertainty

It's hard to step away from our assumptions and actually consider the experiences that non-technical people have using the web.

Reconsuming Ideals

Portigal Consulting talk about the analog human and the digital machine.

The Recovery Approach

Interview with a Nigerian email scammer.

Un-favrd

Twitter as performance; Dean Allen ruminates on the end of an experiment.

Alice and Kev

The world of Alice and Kev is an experiment by Robin Burkinshaw, playing a homeless family in The Sims 3.

The Stress Addiction Loop

In the last 30 years neuroscience has given us great insight into the workings of the human brain and as more information emerges, it becomes clear just how out of step with reality conventional attitudes…