Adam Alter Quotes

The Hannah study showed that people are suggestible, willing to view the world with the guidance of labels when faced with an otherwise unbreakable tie.

Both physical and social pain seem less painful when we're cushioned by symbolic reminders of money, even when the money isn't real or doesn't belong to us.

Addictive tech is part of the mainstream in a way that addictive substances never will be.

Tech isn't morally good or bad until it's wielded by the corporations that fashion it for mass consumption. Apps and platforms can be designed to promote rich social connections; or, like cigarettes, they can be designed to addict. Today, unfortunately, many tech developments do promote addiction.

This striking result suggests that our quest for safety, and our resulting fear of difference, has fostered a justice system that discriminates against black defendants. Put simply, under some circumstances a black man who looks "more black" is 33 percent more likely to receive the death penalty than is a black man who commits the same crime but looks less stereotypically black. Inequalities like these illuminate the sad truth that our hidden, unconscious attitudes toward minorities evolve far more slowly than our overt spoken attitudes. Many of those ugly views are so well hidden that we're not even aware that we hold them. In

Walter Isaacson, who ate dinner with the Jobs family while researching his biography of Steve Jobs, told Bilton that, "No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices." It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.

As French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted sixty years ago, as soon as we imagine we're being watched, we start to notice how we're behaving, and we begin to imagine how other people might respond if they were watching.