Phone and gaming firms ‘control our behaviour’, suggests CIT researcher

The mobile phone and gaming industries are increasingly governing our behaviour by creating addictive products that shape and control how we communicate and interact.

The use of ‘behaviourist techniques’ to control the general populace, once feared as a potential tool of governments, are in fact used by technology companies, with games and apps designed to get us hooked.

That’s according to Jane Leonard, a lecturer at Cork Institute of Technology, who will deliver a talk today entitled From Pavlov to Snapchat — Why we are so addicted to our smartphones and social media, as part of the Psychological Society of Ireland’s Psychology Matters Day.