Socially Engineered Research Articles

I’ll Be There for You: Generating Sustained Student Connectedness from the Beginning

This study examines the efficacy of a redesigned induction session to enhance and sustain student connectedness, addressing ongoing concerns relating to student isolation. We socially engineered the group formation process prior to students undertaking a group activity at undergraduate Business induction sessions. The intention of the activity was for students to collaboratively problem-solve components of the university experience, learn where to seek information and develop connections with peers from day one of their university experience. Our analysis confirms that the social engineering of groups based on similar interests enabled students to establish more sustained peer connections compared with random assignment, and students are generally more satisfied with their induction. These findings have practical implications for universities, which are accepting and enrolling a greater variety of students as they aim to widen participation.

Spear phishing in a barrel: Insights from a targeted phishing campaign

ABSTRACTExecutives in many industries have fallen prey to socially engineered attacks known as spear phishing. Using highly targeted emails, social engineers trick victims into performing unintended actions by masquerading as legitimate actors. To shed light on effective spear phishing training, we conducted a multi-round experiment. Our results indicate that training users with individual loss messaging might increase the effectiveness of the training. Additionally, we found potential evidence that organizational training can lead to increased overall spear phishing awareness, even for those not directly trained. Despite these promising results, however, individuals’ susceptibility to highly targeted spear phishing attacks remains troubling for practitioners and researchers.

B. F. Skinner and technology's nation: Technocracy, social engineering, and the good life in 20th-century America.

Psychologist B. F. Skinner developed and promoted a technology of behavior as the basis for widespread social reform over much of his career. In 1948, he published his behaviorally engineered vision of the good life in his utopian novel Walden Two (Skinner, 1948). Skinner's efforts were part of a much larger social engineering tradition that received one of its fullest expressions in the Technocracy Movement of the 1930s. Fifteen years before Skinner's Walden Two, at the height of the Technocracy Movement's public visibility in the United States, technocrat Harold Loeb (1933/1996) published his utopia, Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like. In this article, I place the socially engineered visions of the good life promoted by the Technocracy Movement and by Skinner on an intellectual and ideological continuum to amplify and explore American attitudes toward psychology, technology, and social engineering during the middle decades of the 20th century. I argue that responses to both reveal the possibilities and limits of the social engineering enterprise, and suggest that historians of technology might consider how the history of psychology and other psy-disciplines can deepen conceptualizations of the relationships among the psychological, the social, and the technological in this period. (PsycINFO Database Record

Distance Art Education: The Federal School and Social Engineering in the United States, 1900 to 1925

The Federal School was a correspondence art school in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the early 20th century. At that time, scientific methods changed the organization and practice of commercial art training and industrial education, which included correspondence courses from the Federal School. Standards of intelligence were determined with intelligence testing, and students were tracked into vocational or professional programs depending on their scores. The Federal School contradicted itself as it promoted stereotypes in which intelligence correlated to race, ethnicity, and sex roles. The same stereotypes appeared in the curricula of the Federal School, making it a part of the larger configuration of education and mass media that socially engineered cultural production.

Socially Engineered Groups in Business Curricula: An Investigation of the Effects of Team Composition on Group Output

Abstract Group activities, a common feature of business education, are expected to continue to increase in popularity. This article explores the formulation of groups and “social-engineering” methodology. The formulation process differs from the more traditional random assignment or self-selection in that it attempts to create groups with diverse backgrounds, talents, abilities, perspectives, and so forth. The results of an experiment suggest that for certain task types, social engineering and groups can be more effective than random assignments or self-selection.