Oct
11
Tech. and Psych.
The first of the talks that had anything worth writing about was by Suw Charman-Anderson and gave a look into how psychology can be applied to technology and in particular things people do on the web. The highlights are online to watch, and Jemima Kiss at the Guardian has a short write-up that also links to an article previously by Suw in the paper on email compulsion.
The rewards offered by addictive sites, Lolcats are the example, are compared to the food presented to the rats in Skinner’s experiments. There’s a good summary of this here, and Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of versions of Behaviourism, and on Operant Conditioning in particular.