【推荐1】You might text your friend a white lie to get out of going to dinner, exaggerate your height on a CV online to appear more attractive or invent an excuse for your boss over email to save face.

Social psychologists have long wondered where people tend to lie the most — that is, in person or through some other communication medium. A 2004 study was among the first to investigate the connection between deception (欺骗) rates and technology. Jeff Hancock’s team had 28 students report the number of social interactions they had through face-to-face communication, the phone, instant messaging and email over seven days. Students also reported the number of times they lied in each social interaction.

The results suggested people told the most lies on the phone and the fewest through email, which is broadly in line with a “feature-based model”. According to the model, specific aspects of a technology — whether people can communicate back and forth smoothly, whether the messages are fleeting and whether communicators are distant — predict where people tend to lie the most.

When Hancock conducted his study, few students had a Facebook account. The iPhone was in its early stage. What would his results look like nearly 20 years later?

In a new study, I recruited (招募) 250 people and studied interactions from more forms of technology. The participants recorded their social interactions and number of interactions with a lie over seven days, across face-to-face communication, social media, the phone, texting, video chat and email. The results show people seem to lie according to the “feature-based model”.

There are several possible explanations for these results. Phone and video chat, for example, might make deception less costly to a social relationship if caught. Deception rates might also differ across technology because people use some forms of technology for certain social relationships. For example, people might only email their colleagues (同事), while video chat might be a better fit for more personal relationships.

People often believe just because we use technology to interact, honesty is harder to come by. Not only is this perception (看法) misguided, but it is also unsupported by enough evidence. The belief that lying is common in the digital age just doesn’t match the data.

【推荐2】For the past three decades, companies and consumers have benefited from cross—border connections that have helped to maintain a steady supply of electronics, clothes, toys and other goods so abundant that it has managed to keep prices low across the board.

However, as the pandemic and the Russia — Ukraine conflict continue to weigh on trade and business ties, that period of plenty appears to be undergoing a partial reversal. Companies are rethinking where to source their products and are stockpiling inventory (库存), even at the potential cost of lowering their efficiency and increasing their operation expense. If the situation lasts for very long, _________could have important implications for inflation (通货膨胀) and the world economy.

American economists are debating whether recent supply chain troubles and geopolitical conflicts will result in a shake-up of global production, in which factories that had previously been sent offshore or areas with fewer tax regulations, move back to the United States or into other more stable countries. If this happens, a decades-long decline in the prices of many goods could come to an end. We may even witness a slide backwards, meaning a potential boost in prices and overall inflation as a result.

The period of global integration before the pandemic made many of the things Americans buy cheaper. Computers and other forms of technology made factories more efficient, and they rolled out sneakers, kitchen tables, and electronics at a pace unmatched in history. Companies slashed their production costs by moving factories offshore, where wages were lower. The adoption of steel shipping containers and ever larger cargo ships allowed products to be transported from Bangladesh and China to Seattle and Tupelo and everywhere in between at astonishingly low prices.

Those changes, however, had consequences for American factory workers, who saw many jobs disappear. Katherine Tai, the U. S. trade representative, said that, while American consumers have enjoyed the “luxury” of low prices for imported goods for a long time now, the system upon which it was built has always been a very “fragile” one. Americans are not just consumers, but also workers who have to compete in a global marketplace for talent where globalization “has damaged opportunities and wages for average American workers”.

“Some returning is occurring — let’s make no mistake about that.” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala., the Director-General of the World Trade Organization, said in an interview. But the data shows that most businesses are reducing their risk by building up their inventories and finding additional suppliers in low-cost countries, such as Vietnam and Mexico. This process could end up helping more deeply integtate poorer countries in Africa and other parts of the world into the global value chains, said Dr. Okonjo-Iweala.

The intertwined trajectory (轨迹) of globalization, low prices, and inflation on the whole will be closely watched by economists over the years to come. “It would certainly be a different world.” Jerome H. Powel, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said when asked about a possible move away from globalization. “It’s not obvious how dramatically conditions will change,” he said. “But it’s clear that it’s slowed down.”

【推荐2】We are encountering real-world examples of how AI can harm human relations. As digital assistants such as Alexa or Siri become popular, we are becoming accustomed to talking to them as though they were alive; writing in these pages last year, Judith Shulevitz described how some of us are starting to treat them as friends and therapists. Shulevitz herself says she confesses things to Google Assistant that she wouldn’t tell her husband. If we grow more comfortable talking to our devices about our secrets, what happens to our human marriages and friendships? Designers and programmers typically create devices whose responses make us feel better—but may not help us be self-reflective or think over painful truths. As AI goes deeper into our lives, we must face the possibility that it will prevent our emotions and deep human connects.

Besides, we will fight with some other challenges. The age of driverless cars, after all, is upon us. These vehicles promise to substantially reduce the exhaustion and distraction that put human drivers in danger, thus preventing accidents. But what other effects might they have on people? Driving is a very modern kind of social interaction, requiring high levels of cooperation. I worry that driverless cars, by taking away from us an occasion to exercise this ability, could contribute to its decline.

Not only will these vehicles be programmed to take over driving duties and hence to remove from humans the power to make moral judgments (for example, about which pedestrian to hit when a crash is inevitable), they will also affect humans with whom they’ve had no direct contact. For instance, drivers who have steered awhile alongside an autonomous vehicle traveling at a steady, invariant speed might drive less attentively, thus increasing their likelihood of accidents once they’ve moved to a part of the highway occupied only by human drivers. Alternatively, experience may reveal that driving alongside autonomous vehicles travelling in perfect accordance with traffic laws actually improves human performance.

Either way, we should be careful to launch new forms of AI without first taking such social spillovers—or externalities, as they’re often called—into account. We must apply the same effort that we apply to the hardware and software that make self-driving cars possible to managing AI’s potential effects on those outside the car. After all, we install brake lights on the back of your car not just, or even primarily, for your benefit, but for the sake of the people behind you.