Ethics and responsible AI deployment.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent, protecting personal privacy is a critical ethical issue that must be addressed. This article explores the need for ethical AI systems that safeguard individual privacy while complying with ethical standards. By taking a multidisciplinary approach, the research examines innovative algorithmic techniques such as differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, federated learning, international regulatory frameworks, and ethical guidelines. The study concludes that these algorithms effectively enhance privacy protection while balancing the utility of AI with the need to protect personal data. The article emphasises the importance of a comprehensive approach that combines technological innovation with ethical and regulatory strategies to harness the power of AI in a way that respects and protects individual privacy.

Digital traces of offline mobilization.

Since 2009, there has been an increase in global protests and related online activity. Yet, it is unclear how and why online activity is related to the mobilization of offline collective action. One proposition is that online polarization (or a relative change in intensity of posting mobilizing content around a salient grievance) can mobilize people offline. The identity-norm nexus and normative alignment models of collective action further argue that to be mobilizing, these posts need to be socially validated. To test these propositions, across two analyses, we used digital traces of online behavior and data science techniques to model people's online and offline behavior around a mass protest. In Study 1a, we used Twitter behavior posted on the day of the protest by attendees or nonattendees (759 users; 7,592 tweets) to train and test a classifier that predicted, with 80% accuracy, who participated in offline collective action. Attendees used their mobile devices to plan logistics and broadcast their presence at the protest. In Study 1b, using the longitudinal Twitter data and metadata of a subset of users from Study 1a (209 users; 277,556 tweets), we found that participation in the protest was not associated with an individual's online polarization over the year prior to the protest, but it was positively associated with the validation ("likes") they received on their relevant posts. These two studies demonstrate that rather than being low cost or trivial, socially validated online interactions about a grievance are actually key to the mobilization and enactment of collective action. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Measurement practices exacerbate the generalizability crisis: Novel digital measures can help.

Psychology's tendency to focus on confirmatory analyses before ensuring constructs are clearly defined and accurately measured is exacerbating the generalizability crisis. Our growing use of digital behaviors as predictors has revealed the fragility of subjective measures and the latent constructs they scaffold. However, new technologies can provide opportunities to improve conceptualizations, theories, and measurement practices.

Personality and Motives for Social Media Use When Physically Distanced: A Uses and Gratifications Approach.

This paper explores individuals' motives for using social media when living under 'social distancing' conditions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, where they were instructed to physically distance from other people. Adopting a 'uses and gratifications' approach, and using a previously established five-factor scale, we examine the relationship between individuals' motives for using social media and their personality traits. Hundred and eighty-nine social media users living in the United Kingdom completed surveys assessing their motives for using social media and their personality. Our findings demonstrate that participants were generally motivated to use social media to 'pass time' and to 'maintain relationships.' Further, we find that those high in extraversion in particular use social media to 'maintain relationships.' By comparing our findings to previous studies where face-to-face interaction was not restricted, our findings indicate that individuals' motives for using social media change when they are placed under physical distancing restrictions. We reflect on the potential application of our findings for others experiencing similar conditions, such as those working in remote locations, as well as the potential implications for living in a post-pandemic world with increased virtual 'meetings' using social media.

An Exploratory Study Into the Negotiation of Cyber-Security Within the Family Home.

Given the increasingly young age that children are using technology and accessing the internet and its associated risks, it is important we understand how families manage and negotiate cyber-security within the home. We conducted an exploratory qualitative study with thirteen families (14 parents and 19 children) in the south-west of the United Kingdom about their main cyber-security concerns and management strategies. Thematic analysis of the results revealed that families were concerned about cyberbullying, online stranger danger, privacy, content, financial scams, and technical threats. Both parents and children drew on family, friends and trusted others as resources, and used a variety of strategies to manage these threats including rules and boundaries around technology, using protective functions of technology, communication and education around safety. There were tensions between parents and children over boundaries, potentially putting families at risk if children break household rules around cyber-security. Finally, parents expressed the feeling they were in a 'whole new world' of cyber-security threats, and that positive and negative aspects of technology must be constantly balanced. However, parents also felt that the challenges in managing family security are the same ones that have always faced parents - it is just that the context is now digital as well as physical.

The evolution of online ideological communities.

Online communities are virtual spaces for users to share interests, support others, and to exchange knowledge and information. Understanding user behavior is valuable to organizations and has applications from marketing to security, for instance, identifying leaders within a community or predicting future behavior. In the present research, we seek to understand the various roles that users adopt in online communities-for instance, who leads the conversation? Who are the supporters? We examine user role changes over time and the pathways that users follow. This allows us to explore the differences between users who progress to leadership positions and users who fail to develop influence. We also reflect on how user role proportions impact the overall health of the community. Here, we examine two online ideological communities, RevLeft and Islamic Awakening (N = 1631; N = 849), and provide a novel approach to identify various types of users. Finally, we study user role trajectories over time and identify community "leaders" from meta-data alone. Study One examined both communities using K-MEANS cluster analysis of behavioral meta-data, which revealed seven user roles. We then mapped these roles against Preece and Schneiderman's (2009) Reader-to-Leader Framework (RtLF). Both communities aligned with the RtLF, where most users were "contributors", many were "collaborators", and few were "leaders". Study Two looked at one community over a two-year period and found that, despite a high churn rate of users, roles were stable over time. We built a model of user role transitions over the two years. This can be used to predict user role changes in the future, which will have implications for community managers and security focused contexts (e.g., analyzing behavioral meta-data from forums and websites known to be associated with illicit activity).

Social Desirability in Spouse Ratings.

Whether or not socially desirable responding is a cause for concern in personality assessment has long been debated. For many researchers, McCrae and Costa laid the issue to rest when they showed that correcting for socially desirable responding in self-reports did not improve the agreement with spouse ratings on the Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness to Experience Personality Inventory. However, their findings rest on the assumption that observer ratings in general, and spouse ratings in particular, are an unbiased external criterion. If spouse ratings are also susceptible to socially desirable responding, correcting for the bias in self-rated measures cannot be assumed to increase agreement between self-reports and spouse ratings, and thus failure to do so should not be taken as evidence for the ineffectiveness of measuring and correcting for socially desirable responding. In the present study, McCrae and Costa's influential study was replicated with the exception of measuring socially desirable responding with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, in both self-reports and spouse ratings. Analyses were based on responses from 70 couples who had lived together for at least one year. The results showed that both self-reports and spouse ratings are susceptible to socially desirable responding and thus McCrae and Costa's conclusion is drawn into question.

Questions on honest responding.

This article presents a new method for reducing socially desirable responding in Internet self-reports of desirable and undesirable behavior. The method is based on moving the request for honest responding, often included in the introduction to surveys, to the questioning phase of the survey. Over a quarter of Internet survey participants do not read survey instructions, and therefore, instead of asking respondents to answer honestly, they were asked whether they responded honestly. Posing the honesty message in the form of questions on honest responding draws attention to the message, increases the processing of it, and puts subsequent questions in context with the questions on honest responding. In three studies (nStudy I = 475, nStudy II = 1,015, nStudy III = 899), we tested whether presenting the questions on honest responding before questions on desirable and undesirable behavior could increase the honesty of responses, under the assumption that less attribution of desirable behavior and/or admitting to more undesirable behavior could be taken to indicate more honest responses. In all studies the participants who were presented with the questions on honest responding before questions on the target behavior produced, on average, significantly less socially desirable responses, though the effect sizes were small in all cases (Cohen's d ranging between 0.02 and 0.28 for single items, and from 0.17 to 0.34 for sum scores). The overall findings and the possible mechanisms behind the influence of the questions concerning honest responding on subsequent questions are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research.

What demographic attributes do our digital footprints reveal? A systematic review.

To what extent does our online activity reveal who we are? Recent research has demonstrated that the digital traces left by individuals as they browse and interact with others online may reveal who they are and what their interests may be. In the present paper we report a systematic review that synthesises current evidence on predicting demographic attributes from online digital traces. Studies were included if they met the following criteria: (i) they reported findings where at least one demographic attribute was predicted/inferred from at least one form of digital footprint, (ii) the method of prediction was automated, and (iii) the traces were either visible (e.g. tweets) or non-visible (e.g. clickstreams). We identified 327 studies published up until October 2018. Across these articles, 14 demographic attributes were successfully inferred from digital traces; the most studied included gender, age, location, and political orientation. For each of the demographic attributes identified, we provide a database containing the platforms and digital traces examined, sample sizes, accuracy measures and the classification methods applied. Finally, we discuss the main research trends/findings, methodological approaches and recommend directions for future research.

Understanding the Psychological Process of Avoidance-Based Self-Regulation on Facebook.

In relation to social network sites, prior research has evidenced behaviors (e.g., censoring) enacted by individuals used to avoid projecting an undesired image to their online audiences. However, no work directly examines the psychological process underpinning such behavior. Drawing upon the theory of self-focused attention and related literature, a model is proposed to fill this research gap. Two studies examine the process whereby public self-awareness (stimulated by engaging with Facebook) leads to a self-comparison with audience expectations and, if discrepant, an increase in social anxiety, which results in the intention to perform avoidance-based self-regulation. By finding support for this process, this research contributes an extended understanding of the psychological factors leading to avoidance-based regulation when online selves are subject to surveillance.

Applying evolutionary psychology to a serious game about children's interpersonal conflict.

This article describes the use of evolutionary psychology to inform the design of a serious computer game aimed at improving 9-12-year-old children's conflict resolution skills. The design of the game will include dynamic narrative generation and emotional tagging, and there is a strong evolutionary rationale for the effect of both of these on conflict resolution. Gender differences will also be taken into consideration in designing the game. In interview research in schools in three countries (Greece, Portugal, and the UK) aimed at formalizing the game requirements, we found that gender differences varied in the extent to which they applied cross-culturally. Across the three countries, girls were less likely to talk about responding to conflict with physical aggression, talked more about feeling sad about conflict and about conflicts over friendship alliances, and talked less about conflicts in the context of sports or games. Predicted gender differences in anger and reconciliation were not found. Results are interpreted in terms of differing underlying models of friendship that are motivated by parental investment theory. This research will inform the design of the themes that we use in game scenarios for both girls and boys.

Self-esteem, interpersonal risk, and preference for e-mail to face-to-face communication.

The media choices made by high and low self-esteem Internet users were studied using web-based methodology (n = 265). Participants were asked to rank four media (face-to-face, e-mail, letter, and telephone) in order of preference across four different communication scenarios designed to pose an interpersonal risk. The level of interpersonal risk posed by two of the scenarios (asking for a pay rise and asking for a date) were also experimentally manipulated by randomly allocating participants to a 25%, 50%, or 75% chance of rejection. Low self-esteem users (LSE) showed a significant preference toward e-mail communication compared to high self-esteem users (HSE). This pattern was reversed for face-to-face preferences. Similarly, a greater chance of rejection in a scenario led to e-mail being preferred to face-to-face communication. The results are discussed in light of both the strategic use of different media and the motivated Internet user.