Category: The Conversation – UK

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Patrick E. Shea, Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Global Governance, University of Glasgow

The US president, Donald Trump, presided over two major agreements in early December. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda signed a peace deal initially negotiated in June. At the same ceremony, Trump announced a strategic partnership between the US and the DRC.

The US-DRC agreement grants American companies priority access to the country’s vast mineral wealth. US firms get “right of first offer” on major mining projects. The DRC holds significant reserves of cobalt, copper and lithium.

This caps a remarkable six-month period. Since August, the Trump administration has signed mineral access agreements with Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and reportedly Argentina. It has also negotiated bilateral arrangements with Saudi Arabia, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan.

The pace is striking. Traditional development programmes that secured American economic interests abroad typically took years to negotiate and implement. These deals are happening in weeks.

This isn’t simply Trump putting American economic interests forward. The scramble reveals how far the US has fallen behind China in securing access to critical minerals – and how much of that gap is the US’s own fault.

US presidents have always mixed economic interests with foreign policy. In the 1940s and early 50s, the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe while opening markets. Cold War development aid created trading partners while dampening communist appeal. So Trump’s transactional style isn’t entirely new.

But the current mineral scramble stems from three converging problems – many of the administration’s own making.

Transactional approach

First, China restricted US access to critical minerals in retaliation for Trump’s tariff policies. Beijing imposed export controls on rare earth elements essential for the US to manufacture semiconductors, batteries and defence systems.

This created immediate supply-chain vulnerabilities. The US lacks domestic sources of these minerals. American tech and defence companies suddenly faced potential shortages with no alternative suppliers readily available.

Initially, this vulnerability may not have concerned Trump. During his first term, critical minerals weren’t a foreign policy priority. The 2017 national security strategy didn’t mention them. These materials were associated primarily with the green energy transition, a policy area Trump actively opposed.

But the rapid development of artificial intelligence changed the calculation. Training large AI models requires massive data centres. These facilities depend on advanced cooling systems, high-efficiency motors and power systems that use rare-earth elements now restricted by China.

Critical mineral access had become a strategic imperative for the US. Trump’s November 2025 national security strategy explicitly prioritises “securing access to critical supply chains and materials”. This shift coincides with the second problem: the tech sector’s growing influence over American politics. Major tech companies have secured unprecedented access to policymaking and dramatically increased their lobbying since ChatGPT first launched in late 2022.

Whether these mineral deals actually benefit the US as a whole remains unclear. The scramble treats mineral access as a zero-sum competition with China rather than a challenge that could be managed through international coordination. In addition, these rushed agreements may serve AI companies’ short-term needs without creating long term supply chain security.

The third problem for US foreign policy is the US gutted its institutional capacity for securing overseas investments. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) traditionally ran programmes that built state capacity in developing countries. These initiatives trained civil servants, developed regulatory frameworks and established procurement systems.

My research shows how programmes facilitated US investments. When countries had functioning land registries, clear property rights and professional bureaucracies, US companies could invest with confidence.

Trump froze USAID operations in January 2025. Without these institutions, the US can no longer build the governance frameworks that make American investment feasible. Instead, the administration must negotiate explicit access provisions in each bilateral deal.

The pace of recent deals reflects US’s desperate attempts to catch up with China. Whether the US can catch up will have to be evaluated, but there are several reasons to be sceptical of the benefits of the deals that have already been signed.

The DRC agreement illustrates the limitations of this approach. It promises US support for “protection of critical infrastructure” and “safeguarding territorial integrity”. But it offers little detail on how these commitments will be delivered.

Fighting between M23 rebels and DRC forces has continued even as the agreements were announced. The US lacks the institutional capacity to coordinate effective security cooperation. USAID programmes that would have built state capacity and investment safeguards no longer exist. The State Department offices that would implement security assistance have been hollowed out.

The agreement promises to establish “streamlined permitting processes” for US investors in the mining sector. But it’s unclear how investor disputes will be resolved or how American access will remain secure if political circumstances change.

Attention span

Trump’s track record further undermines these arrangements. His pattern of abandoning both promises and threats makes any commitment less credible. Investors understand this. When Trump threatened comprehensive sanctions against Russia in July 2025, Russian markets rallied rather than panicked.

Compare this to the institutional approach. USAID programmes built genuine state capacity over the years. Countries became better able to manage resources, enforce contracts and maintain stability. That created lasting conditions favourable to American investment while also supporting local development.

Without institutional backing, these mineral deals rely entirely on continued presidential attention and goodwill. My research shows that credible economic commitments require a robust diplomatic and bureaucratic apparatus. Trump has undermined this infrastructure.

If the US wants to secure critical mineral supplies effectively, reversing course would be necessary. Reinstating development agencies and rebuilding diplomatic capacity would serve American interests far better than serial bilateral bargaining.

But that would require patience and institutional investment. Trump’s approach offers neither. The US has fallen behind in the race for critical minerals. These rushed deals may provide short-term access. But they cannot create the stable, long-term supply chains American tech and defence industries actually need.

Patrick E. Shea does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Donald Trump’s peace agreements are also business deals – https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-peace-agreements-are-also-business-deals-271539

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Perla Maiolino, Associate Professor of Engineering Science, member of the Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford

Robots now see the world with an ease that once belonged only to science fiction. They can recognise objects, navigate cluttered spaces and sort thousands of parcels an hour. But ask a robot to touch something gently, safely or meaningfully, and the limits appear instantly.

As a researcher in soft robotics working on artificial skin and sensorised bodies, I’ve found that trying to give robots a sense of touch forces us to confront just how astonishingly sophisticated human touch really is.

My work began with the seemingly simple question of how robots might sense the world through their bodies. Develop tactile sensors, fully cover a machine with them, process the signals and, at first glance, you should get something like touch.

Except that human touch is nothing like a simple pressure map. Our skin contains several distinct types of mechanoreceptor, each tuned to different stimuli such as vibration, stretch or texture. Our spatial resolution is remarkably fine and, crucially, touch is active: we press, slide and adjust constantly, turning raw sensation into perception through dynamic interaction.

Engineers can sometimes mimic a fingertip-scale version of this, but reproducing it across an entire soft body, and giving a robot the ability to interpret this rich sensory flow, is a challenge of a completely different order.

Working on artificial skin also quickly reveals another insight: much of what we call “intelligence” doesn’t live solely in the brain. Biology offers striking examples – most famously, the octopus.

Octopuses distribute most of their neurons throughout their limbs. Studies of their motor behaviour show an octopus arm can generate and adapt movement patterns locally based on sensory input, with limited input from the brain.

Their soft, compliant bodies contribute directly to how they act in the world. And this kind of distributed, embodied intelligence, where behaviour emerges from the interplay of body, material and environment, is increasingly influential in robotics.

Touch also happens to be the first sense that humans develop in the womb. Developmental neuroscience shows tactile sensitivity emerging from around eight weeks of gestation, then spreading across the body during the second trimester. Long before sight or hearing function reliably, the foetus explores its surroundings through touch. This is thought to help shape how infants begin forming an understanding of weight, resistance and support – the basic physics of the world.

This distinction matters for robotics too. For decades, robots have relied heavily on cameras and lidars (a sensing method that uses pulses of light to measure distance) while avoiding physical contact. But we cannot expect machines to achieve human-level competence in the physical world if they rarely experience it through touch.

Simulation can teach a robot useful behaviour, but without real physical exploration, it risks merely deploying intelligence rather than developing it. To learn in the way humans do, robots need bodies that feel.

Intelligent bodies

One approach my group is exploring is giving robots a degree of “local intelligence” in their sensorised bodies. Humans benefit from the compliance of soft tissues: skin deforms in ways that increase grip, enhance friction and filter sensory signals before they even reach the brain. This is a form of intelligence embedded directly in the anatomy.

Research in soft robotics and morphological computation argues that the body can offload some of the brain’s workload. By building robots with soft structures and low-level processing, so they can adjust grip or posture based on tactile feedback without waiting for central commands, we hope to create machines that interact more safely and naturally with the physical world.

Healthcare is one area where this capability could make a profound difference. My group recently developed a robotic patient simulator for training occupational therapists (OTs). Students often practise on one another, which makes it difficult to learn the nuanced tactile skills involved in supporting someone safely. With real patients, trainees must balance functional and affective touch, respect personal boundaries and recognise subtle cues of pain or discomfort. Research on social and affective touch shows how important these cues are to human wellbeing.

To help trainees understand these interactions, our simulator, known as Mona, produces practical behavioural responses. For example, when an OT presses on a simulated pain point in the artificial skin, the robot reacts verbally and with a small physical “hitch” of the body to mimic discomfort.

Similarly, if the trainee tries to move a limb beyond what the simulated patient can tolerate, the robot tightens or resists, offering a realistic cue that the motion should stop. By capturing tactile interaction through artificial skin, our simulator provides feedback that has never previously been available in OT training.

Robots that care

In the future, robots with safe, sensitive bodies could help address growing pressures in social care. As populations age, many families suddenly find themselves lifting, repositioning or supporting relatives without formal training. “Care robots” would help with this, potentially meaning the family member could be cared for at home longer.

Surprisingly, progress in developing this type of robot has been much slower than early expectations suggested – even in Japan, which introduced some of the first care robot prototypes. One of the most advanced examples is Airec, a humanoid robot developed as part of the Japanese government’s Moonshot programme to assist in nursing and elderly-care tasks. This multifaceted programme, launched in 2019, seeks “ambitious R&D based on daring ideas” in order to build a “society in which human beings can be free from limitations of body, brain, space and time by 2050”.

Throughout the world, though, translating research prototypes into regulated robots remains difficult. High development costs, strict safety requirements, and the absence of a clear commercial market have all slowed progress. But while the technical and regulatory barriers are substantial, they are steadily being addressed.

Robots that can safely share close physical space with people need to feel and modulate how they touch anything that comes into contact with their bodies. This whole-body sensitivity is what will distinguish the next generation of soft robots from today’s rigid machines.

We are still far from robots that can handle these intimate tasks independently. But building touch-enabled machines is already reshaping our understanding of touch. Every step toward robotic tactile intelligence highlights the extraordinary sophistication of our own bodies – and the deep connection between sensation, movement and what we call intelligence.

This article was commissioned in conjunction with the Professors’ Programme, part of Prototypes for Humanity, a global initiative that showcases and accelerates academic innovation to solve social and environmental challenges. The Conversation is the media partner of Prototypes for Humanity 2025.

This article was commissioned in conjunction with the Professors’ Programme, part of Prototypes for Humanity, a global initiative that showcases and accelerates academic innovation to solve social and environmental challenges. The Conversation is the media partner of Prototypes for Humanity 2025. Perla Maiolino receives funding from the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and EU Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme.

– ref. The science of human touch – and why it’s so hard to replicate in robots – https://theconversation.com/the-science-of-human-touch-and-why-its-so-hard-to-replicate-in-robots-271558

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jessica Ringrose, Professor of the Sociology of Gender and Education, Institute of Education, UCL

A ban on social media for under-16s in Australia comes into effect on December 10 2025. Young people will see their accounts deactivated, with social media companies responsible for enacting the ban.

In the UK, the government has committed to addressing young people’s use of the internet through the Online Safety Act rather than enforcing an outright ban.

However, children’s use of devices is often limited. Bans on smartphones in schools, as well as parent pledges to delay their children’s smartphone use, have gained widespread traction in the UK. They are based on assumptions including that smartphone use is addictive, distracting and leads to children doing worse in school.

On the other hand, though, research suggests the cause and effect may not be so clearcut. Studies have found that phone banning in schools does not significantly increase academic attainment or improve wellbeing.

We are academics with decades of experience exploring young people’s use of digital media. Our ongoing research suggests that an outright ban on social media platforms for under-16s is problematic. It neglects young people’s rights and voice and penalises them rather than targeting social media platforms.

Bans could erode trust between young people and the adults in their lives. Children may be put off telling adults about something harmful they’re not supposed to have seen. This could lead to them being less able to access support.

Our ongoing study is exploring the implications of banning smartphones in schools in England. Survey data suggests that most schools in the UK do not allow phones to be used at all during the school day.

Previous research by one of us (Jessica Ringrose) explored young people’s experiences with smartphones and social media at school. This research found that girls were being sent nude images by boys at their schools and were exposed to misogynistic messages originating from the manosphere.

Nevertheless, our ongoing work shows widespread opposition to phone school bans among young people. There’s a generational divide: 75% of young people opposed school phone bans, while most parents (88%) and teachers (87%) supported them.

A problem with strict bans in school settings is that issues and harms young people may encounter online, including those that originate from their classmates, are displaced from school.

One of us (Jessica) has previously carried out research on the challenges of combating digital harms in schools that found schools lacked victim support and young people feared reporting online abuse. “No phone” policies may perpetuate this. Young people may be put off showing teachers something online that upset them when they know they’re not supposed to get out their phone.

For parents, too, phone bans may be a way of pushing away a problem they don’t feel equipped or supported to deal with. Interviews with mothers in the US who had signed pledges to delay giving young people smartphones revealed this uncertainty.

Smartphone avoidance strategies delayed the need to engage in other, more nuanced, forms of parental mediation of digital devices. Simply deferring young people’s use of smartphones may not deal with the doubts and fears that parents feel around their children’s use of technology.

Interviews with parents and carers from our ongoing study show they feel overwhelmed and unsupported when it comes to their children’s smartphone use. “When you’re a busy parent, making sure you’re on top of monitoring what they’re doing seems like quite a hard task,” one mother said. “There’s just not enough guidance,” another commented.

What teens think

Our ongoing work is focused on hearing what young people have to say about phone bans. It suggests that bans make young people feel a loss of autonomy and agency, and that they want guidance from adults on smartphone and social media use.

This need for support is something that research has consistently found that young people want. They want to be able to talk to adults and to be listened to without judgement.

We are not dismissing parents’ or teachers’ concerns, nor their hopes for safer smartphone futures. We are also not suggesting students use phones during lessons when it is not appropriate. Rather we argue that listening to young people’s and families’ views about and hopes for tech is crucial.

Research from the House of Lords shows an urgent need for critical thinking and analytical skills to access, evaluate, create and act on media, for both children and adults. Teachers have pointed to major gaps in media literacy education, especially around social media and AI.

But without addressing this at school, online harms are not reduced. Instead, responsibility for them is shifted onto parents, who already feel ill-equipped to address children’s online lives.

By focusing on media literacy in both policies and the curriculum, schools can address children’s experiences and views. This could include covering issues such as AI and social media business models, algorithms, misinformation, surveillance, privacy and consent in the use of technology.

It’s best if schools and parents are able to work together to address rapidly shifting technology concerns such as AI, instead of shifting responsibility back and forth. Parents and families need support to help children navigate responsible use of social media and issues including AI and consent.

Rebecca Coleman receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Jessica Ringrose does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Should the UK follow Australia’s under-16s social media ban? It could do more harm than good – https://theconversation.com/should-the-uk-follow-australias-under-16s-social-media-ban-it-could-do-more-harm-than-good-269754

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Clodagh Philippa Guerin, PhD Candidate in Refugee World Literature, University of Limerick

In times of war and crisis, poetry can become more than just art: it can become testimony. For the people of Palestine living under siege, poetry is not a mere reflection of their suffering, but rather an act of resistance which campaigns for survival and remembrance.

Poetry has adopted these functions throughout history. Most famously in the west, the poetry of the first and second world wars still haunts cultural and sociological imaginations, from Wilfred Owen’s depictions of the trenches to Primo Levi’s poetic recollections of surviving the Holocaust.

But survivors from across history and the wider world have turned to the poetic form in an attempt to distil chaos into meaning, and to offer a language to witnessing where oppressive silence threatens to prevail.

For more than two years our phones, newspapers and televisions have displayed an onslaught of imagery documenting the violence in Palestine. The images that we have come to expect from the bitter conflict, while recording the realities of survivors on the ground, can also often portray Palestinian people as the passive victims of what has become a largely decontextualised violence.

While coverage of crisis in the media aims to elicit empathy and immediate action, it relies on portraying displaced people as hopeless victims. This re-enforces their position as outsiders while attempting to rekindle a sense of urgency in audiences who have grown desensitised to crises across the globe that are protracted and countless.

This is a common trope in the portrayal of refugees and displaced people. Many have come to expect bleak images of destruction, starving children with crying mothers, and people in camps without basic necessities.

In the era of 24-hour news cycles and never-ending scrolling, why does poetry in times of crisis still matter? I believe it is because the enduring nature of poetry slows us down.

Where headlines and TikToks flash and vanish, poetry lingers, demanding contemplation. Social media no doubt plays a role in the wider dissemination of poetry. After their deaths, Alareer’s and Abu Nada’s poems have been shared millions of times for example. However, the poem as a form itself resists the fleeting, disposable nature of digital content.

Poetry offers something that news and visual imagery cannot in times of crisis: depth over immediacy and meaning over spectacle. The poetry being penned by Palestinian people is an alternative archive of their experience of Israel’s two-year assault on Gaza, preserving their voices and identity against erasure.

The deaths of Refaat Alareer and Hiba Abu Nada in Israeli airstrikes underscores the stakes of this literary resistance. Posthumously, their work has transformed from the art of witnessing into enduring evidence and history from below.

Examples of Palestinian poetry

Alareer’s “If I Must Die” centres around the use of conditionality: language that expresses possibility or uncertainty. The titular phrase might first signal the poet’s resignation but also highlights his resistance.

The poem does not focus on the trauma porn of violence and death but rather focuses on the practicalities and imperative nature of remembrance.

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

…

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale.

The transformation of the poet’s impending mortality into narrative immortality and continuity situates individual loss within a collective horizon for Palestinian people.

By framing his death in this conditional way, and by using simplistic language to belie the complexity of his poetic message, Alareer asserts agency in what was to become his final moments.

Similarly, Abu Nada’s I Grant You Refuge uses the conceit of shelter to complicate the concepts of safety and asylum.

The poem’s central theme of offering refuge creates a powerful paradox: the destruction of homes and lives in Palestine has created mass displacement and precarity, yet I Grant You Refuge attempts to create a symbolic space for community where literal, physical safety is unachievable.

Nada’s persistent repetition of the phrase “I grant you refuge” inverts the normative dynamic of refugee and host, where the displaced person has become the one who grants refuge, creating a new social dynamic for the Palestinian people. Nada’s death in October 2023 renders the poem tragically self-reflexive. The promise of refuge collapses under bombardment yet endures through poetic testimony.

I grant you refuge in knowing

that the dust will clear,

and they who fell in love and died together

will one day laugh.

In contrast to If I Must Die and I Grant You Refuge, Abu Toha’s Under the Rubble sidesteps metaphor in favour of stark imagery, cataloguing painful scenes of mutilation and violence. For example, a mother collecting her daughter’s flesh “in a piggy bank”, a father killed while fetching bread, a child’s drawings on a wall ending at four feet high because “the painter has died in an air strike”.

Toha’s use of imagery imbues the minutiae details of everyday life with suffering. The poem’s short lines create a fractured structure and a crotchety sense of time, where mundane routine is interrupted by unpredictable violence.

These three poems are but a selection of many testimonial works emerging from Palestine. They illustrate that poetry in times of crisis is neither incidental nor ornamental. Digital platforms accelerate the circulation of images, stories and data, but the rapid, incessant flow of information can make them seem temporary and disconnected from their original meaning.

Poetry, by contrast, demands interpretive engagement and reflection. The viral dissemination of crisis poetry creates a paradox: social media at once amplifies poetry’s reach while its richness of meaning keeps it from feeling as fleeting as other online material.

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Clodagh Philippa Guerin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘If I must die’: poetry from Gaza creates an alternative archive of testimony – https://theconversation.com/if-i-must-die-poetry-from-gaza-creates-an-alternative-archive-of-testimony-271138

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Inès Otosaka, Assistant Professor in Physical Geography and Environmental Science, Northumbria University, Newcastle

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are highly vulnerable to global warming and scientists are being increasingly worried about the possibility of large parts of the ice sheets collapsing, if global temperatures keep on rising.

Scientists have identified three elements that could be triggered, putting the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica at further risk.

These three instabilities are marine ice sheet instability (Misi), marine ice cliff instability (Mici) and surface elevation melt instability (Semi).

The first one (Misi) occurs when the seafloor beneath the ice sheet slopes downwards toward the interior of the ice sheet. The floating platforms of ice that fringe the Antarctic continent, ice shelves, are too weak to help slow down the ice from flowing into the ocean.

Because of this, the retreat of the ice sheet will happen at an accelerated pace and might become irreversible. When this happens, ice thickness increases inland, meaning that more ice is transported from the ice sheet to the ocean, causing the ice sheet to thin and further retreat.

The second factor (Mici) is linked with the collapse of ice cliffs, left after the disintegration of an ice shelf. These ice cliffs, if they become taller than a 30-storey building, are structurally unstable and would collapse through hydrofracturing.

This is a process through which surface meltwater fills crevasses, forcing fractures to rip open and causing the ice shelves to disintegrate. Their collapse would trigger a rapid retreat of the ice sheet as further, taller ice cliffs – also prone to failure – would become exposed behind.

The third one (Semi) relates to when the melting of the ice sheet causes its surface elevation to decrease, exposing it to higher air temperatures and further increasing melt.

Which regions are most vulnerable?

West Antarctica, which is home to some of the fastest moving glaciers in the world including Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, is particularly vulnerable to global warming.

Satellite observations have revealed that these glaciers have retreated, thinned and are flowing faster to the ocean, indicating that Misi is potentially already under way in this region. At the same time, computer models have shown that the retreat of these glaciers will continue in the future.

So far, marine ice cliff instability has been simulated in an ice sheet model but has never been observed in the real world. The conditions that might lead to the formation of such tall ice cliffs and whether their collapse would lead to such dramatic consequences are still poorly understood.

But more glaciers could be at risk if they were to lose their ice shelves, potentially exposing unstable ice cliffs.

Surface melt instability is of particular concern in Greenland where surface melt has increased in the past decade and is becoming the main driver of ice losses.

What would happen?

If one (or several) of these instabilities are triggered, there would be an irreversible retreat of parts of the ice sheets, raising sea levels much faster than currently planned. It would still take centuries for the ice across whole regions to fully retreat.

But it could take just under 300 years, under a catastrophic Mici-driven retreat in west Antarctica. So we would already see a much higher contribution of the ice sheets to rising sea levels by 2300, with more frequent coastal flooding worldwide.

As a rule of thumb, for every centimetre of sea level rise, an additional 6 million people are at risk of coastal flooding.

According to the latest IPCC report, sea levels are predicted to rise between 0.3 and 1.6 metres by 2100, depending on future greenhouse gas emissions. However, an increase of more than 15 meters by 2300 cannot be ruled out.

Satellite observations and computer models help us understand how Greenland and Antarctica are changing and how they will continue to do so in the future. Analysis of satellite records shows that regions of both ice sheets are thinning and flowing more rapidly than before. Using computer models, self-sustaining mechanisms that could lead to increased ice sheet melting in the future have been identified.

My international team, supported by the European Space Agency, is bringing together experts in satellite remote sensing and numerical modelling to determine how close the polar ice sheets are to crossing “tipping points”, beyond which their retreat will become irreversible.

However, there is still much to understand and to research around the triggers of these instabilities, and some computer simulations suggest that
ice cliff failure might not lead to the dramatic outcome that some researchers have predicted.

Understanding more about what this means for future sea level rise will help reduce future risks so that we can avoid the dramatic human, social, and economic consequences that would come with more frequent and severe coastal flooding, storm surging and coastal population relocation.

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Inès Otosaka receives funding from the European Space Agency and the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

– ref. Three things that might trigger massive ice sheet collapse – https://theconversation.com/three-things-that-might-trigger-massive-ice-sheet-collapse-267275

Source: The Conversation – UK – By John McAlaney, Professor in Psychology, Bournemouth University

“Rage bait” has been named the word of the year by the Oxford University Press. It means social media content that is designed to create a strong and negative reaction.

Posting content intended to antagonise people may not seem like a wise strategy for a social media influencer. But people who post content on social media can make more money if their channel has a high level of engagements – regardless of how positively people are responding.

In addition, social media platforms use algorithms that tailor the content we see to what we are likely to engage with. This doesn’t necessarily mean content that will make us happy – the algorithm will learn from any engagement that we have with the content, including angry comments we might post in response.

But there are things you can do to help control your reaction to this kind of content. First though, you need to understand why rage bait is so effective.

Provocative posts can result in a higher number of clicks, shares and comments. This may be a result of a negativity bias, where negative emotions such as anger spread more quickly and more intensely through social networks.

In evolutionary terms, it is more important for us to pay attention to a situation that has caused anger to our group than a situation that has created happiness. Anger suggests that action needs to be taken to resolve an issue, whereas happiness suggests that everything is OK.

Although social media technologies are relatively new, the ways in which we understand and navigate our world are not. We are primed to look for social information, which includes anything that indicates a difference of opinion or possible threat within our social groups.

In the past, the groups we belonged to were typically local to where we lived – our friends, neighbours and colleagues. But the growth of social media means that we can now connect with people from all around the world. That means there are far more groups we can be part of and, in turn, routes through which anger can reach us.

Research has found that people can be quick to align their views with others on anything that prompts a negative emotion, which provides another evolutionary benefit by providing safety in numbers from a potential threat. In this case the person posting the rage bait content takes on the role of the pantomime villain who the audience unites against to boo at.

The other problem is we can post content or comments and immediately get a reply, non-stop 24 hours a day. Typically, we used to have some breaks from anything, or anyone, that caused us a feeling of rage. This would give us an opportunity to calm down and reflect on what had happened, but with the ubiquity of social media it can feel like we no longer have that escape.

Coping with rage bait

An awareness of the motivations behind these posts is a good place to start. There are of course people who post negative content who genuinely believe in what they are posting. But knowing that many of these posts are posted solely to drive engagement helps us reclaim our power over those interactions.

A 2020 study showed that giving people an understanding of manipulation strategies used in the media empowered them to resist these techniques.

Think of the person posting the content as being an actor who is playing a character, and whose actions are driven more by a desire for fame – whether that means being famous or infamous – rather than personal beliefs.

The more that we avoid engaging with any content that induces rage in us the less it will be presented to us. Unlike traditional broadcast media such as TV, we do not need to be a passive audience to social media. Instead we can influence and shape social media through both what we choose to engage with, or not engage with.

Hope instead of rage

Despite the speed and strength with which anger can spread through social media through rage bait, there is emerging research which suggests people can be nudged into reflecting on media content designed to provoke anger before they respond. This can dilute the influence of rage bait.

One benefit of social media as compared to offline interactions is that social media is, by its nature, publicly visible. This means that researchers can more easily understand what is happening on these platforms, including how rage bait is being used to drive engagements.

It can also help us better understand how to help people take control over social media content that we are exposed to, so that we can benefit from the positive aspects of these technologies without being drawn into negative content posted solely for profit.

John McAlaney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Rage bait: the psychology behind social media’s angriest posts – https://theconversation.com/rage-bait-the-psychology-behind-social-medias-angriest-posts-271041

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alan Collins, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Nottingham Trent University

A family builds an off-grid home in rural Wales. TV celebrates it as a blueprint for net-zero living. But what if this vision of sustainability simply doesn’t scale up?

Television shows such as Channel 4’s Grand Designs have long celebrated ambitious one-off homebuilding projects. These programmes often frame bespoke rural housing as a model of sustainable living.

With large audiences, they wield real influence over what viewers imagine an environmentally sustainable lifestyle looks like. But the reality behind many of these supposedly “eco” homes is far more complicated.

The BBC recently explored one such case in Wales, where a family secured planning permission under the Welsh government’s One Planet Development policy. Introduced in 2012, the policy allows zero-carbon homes to be constructed on land where conventional buildings would not be permitted. In return, residents must demonstrate they can provide their own energy and water and derive a basic income from the surrounding land.

At first glance, this all seems a laudable and well-meaning attempt to encourage net-zero living. Yet projects like these raise deeper questions about sustainability, fairness and what it means for a society as a whole to be environmentally responsible.

We can’t all live in rural eco-homes

The first issue is scalability. Rural “eco-homestead” living can appear green at the level of a single household. But how many of these homes, each taking up considerable land, could be built in the Welsh countryside – or the UK more broadly?

A few might operate as experimental demonstration sites in rural areas, but if that’s the goal then a location in or near urban areas would reach far more people.

These homes are not as self-sufficient as the image of rural idyll suggests. People living there would still own cars, commute to work, send children to school and make regular trips for food, healthcare and to socialise. Multiply these car trips over many such developments and their environmental footprint would undermine the very rationale used to approve the developments.

This is the opposite of the 15-minute city ideal. Dispersed rural living simply cannot match the efficiency of compact urban living.

Academic research in economics, geography and planning has long showed that cities generate “agglomeration economies”: the practical benefits of living around lots of other people means schools, healthcare, public transport and other services tend to be more efficient than in the countryside. This makes urban living far more sustainable for large populations and is one reason rural eco-homes are completely unsustainable as a means of meeting genuine housing needs.

Fair and inclusive

The second issue concerns fairness and access. If permission for remote single household plots is to be restricted in number, then that cap should be explicit and justified. At present, it is neither.

The result is that only the wealthy – people able to acquire attractive rural land, navigate the planning system and fund bespoke eco-builds – can pursue this lifestyle. This risks breeding resentment, especially if access to attractive countryside or forest locations becomes effectively privatised by those who can afford large, low-density housing.

This has broader political implications. As the climate crisis intensifies, public support for environmental action depends on perceptions of fairness. If “sustainable living” is seen as something the wealthy perform in idyllic rural retreats while ultimately relying on urban services and infrastructure, that narrative becomes exclusionary and demotivating. It signals that meaningful environmental responsibility isn’t possible for the majority living in towns and cities. That helps create a form of socio-environmental separation: green lifestyles for a wealthy minority, higher environmental costs for everyone else.

Programmes like Grand Designs play an important role in shaping expectations for green living and dream “forever home” residential building projects. Their enthusiasm for remote, self-built eco-homes gives viewers the impression that sustainability is achieved through architectural daring and a retreat from urban life. These stories generate a warm glow for the featured household, but they don’t represent a realistic way to collectively tackle the climate and environment crises.

The most effective solutions are more mundane, and far less televisual. For instance, better roof insulation or the replacement of old boilers could be rolled out for millions of homes and would have a far greater environmental impact. Such policies lack the drama of building a fancy off-grid smallholding, but they are scalable, accessible for all and genuinely aligned with climate goals.

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Alan Collins is a very passive member of the Labour Party

– ref. Why Grand Designs-style eco-homes aren’t a good blueprint for sustainable living – https://theconversation.com/why-grand-designs-style-eco-homes-arent-a-good-blueprint-for-sustainable-living-268751

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Katherine Easton, Lecturer, Psychology, University of Sheffield

Online short-form video has shifted from a light distraction to a constant backdrop in many children’s lives. What used to fill a spare moment now shapes how young people relax, communicate and form opinions, with TikTok, Instagram Reels, Douyin and YouTube Shorts drawing in hundreds of millions of under-18s through endlessly personalised feeds.

These apps feel lively and intimate, offering quick routes to humour, trends and connection, yet their design encourages long sessions of rapid scrolling that can be difficult for young users to manage. They were never built with children in mind, although many children use them daily and often alone.

For some pre-teens, these platforms help develop identity, spark interests and maintain friendships. For others, the flow of content disrupts sleep, erodes boundaries or squeezes out time for reflection and meaningful interaction.

Problematic use is less about minutes spent and more about patterns where scrolling becomes compulsive or hard to stop. These patterns can begin to affect sleep, mood, attention, schoolwork and relationships.

Short-form videos (typically between 15 and 90 seconds) are engineered to capture the brain’s craving for novelty. Each swipe promises something different, whether a joke, prank or shock – and the reward system responds instantly.

Because the feed rarely pauses, the natural breaks that help attention reset vanish. Over time, this can weaken impulse control and sustained focus. A 2023 analysis of 71 studies and nearly 100,000 participants found a moderate link between heavy short-form video use and reduced inhibitory control and attention spans.

Attention hijacked

Sleep is one of the clearest areas where short-form video can take a toll.

Many children today view screens when they should be winding down. The bright light delays the release of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep, making it harder for them to drift off.

But the emotional highs and lows of rapid content make it particularly difficult for the brain to settle. A recent study found that for some teenagers, excessive short-form video use is connected to poorer sleep and higher social anxiety.

These sleep disturbances affect mood, resilience and memory, and can create a cycle that is especially hard for stressed or socially pressured children to break.

Beyond sleep, the constant stream of peer images and curated lifestyles can amplify comparison. Pre-teens may internalise unrealistic standards of popularity, appearance or success, which is linked to lower self-esteem and anxiety – although the same is true for all forms of social media.

Younger children are more susceptible

Most research focuses on teenagers, but younger children have less mature self-regulation and a more fragile sense of identity, leaving them highly susceptible to the emotional pull of quick-fire content.

Exposure to material children never intended to see adds risk and the design of short-form video apps can make this far more likely. Because clips appear instantly and autoplay one after another, children can be shown violent footage, harmful challenges or sexual content before they have time to process what they are seeing or look away.

Unlike longer videos or traditional social media posts, short-form content provides almost no context, no warning, and no opportunity to prepare emotionally. A single swipe can produce a sudden shift in tone from silly to disturbing, which is particularly jarring for developing brains.

Although this content may not always be illegal, it can still be inappropriate for a child’s stage of development. Algorithmic systems learn from a brief moment of exposure, sometimes escalating similar content into the feed. This combination of instant appearance, lack of context, emotional intensity and rapid reinforcement is what makes inappropriate content in short-form video especially problematic for younger users.

Not every child is affected in the same way, though. Those with anxiety, attention difficulties or emotional volatility seem more vulnerable to compulsive scrolling and to the mood swings that follow it.

Some research suggests a cyclical relationship, where young people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, are particularly drawn to rapid content, while heavy use may intensify the symptoms that make self-regulation difficult. Children dealing with bullying, stress, family instability or poor sleep may also use late-night scrolling to cope with difficult emotions.

This matters because childhood is a critical period for learning how to build relationships, tolerate boredom and handle uncomfortable feelings. When every quiet moment is filled with quick entertainment, children lose chances to practise daydreaming, invent games, chat with family or simply let their thoughts wander.

Unstructured time is part of how young minds learn to soothe themselves and develop internal focus. Without it, these skills can weaken.

New guidelines

There are encouraging signs of change as governments and schools begin to address digital wellbeing more explicitly. In England, new statutory guidelines encourage schools to integrate online safety and digital literacy into the curriculum.

Some schools are restricting smartphone use during the school day, and organisations such as Amnesty International are urging platforms to introduce safer defaults, better age-verification and greater transparency around algorithms.

At home, open conversation can help children understand their habits and build healthier ones. Parents can watch videos together, discuss what makes certain clips appealing and explore how particular content made the child feel.

Establishing simple family routines, such as keeping devices out of bedrooms or setting a shared cut-off time for screen use, can protect sleep and reduce late-night scrolling. Encouraging offline activities, hobbies, sports and time with friends also helps maintain a healthy balance.

Short-form videos can be creative, funny and comforting. With thoughtful support, responsive policies and safer platform design, children can enjoy them without compromising their wellbeing or development.

Katherine Easton has recently received funding from:
2021 – UKRI eNurture (PI) £26,762.00 Hacking the school system.
2022 – Research England, HEIF TUoS (PI) £48,983 Digiware: Knowledge Exchange in Education and Internet of Things.
to research young people’s views on the use of technology in their schools

– ref. How short-form videos could be harming young minds – https://theconversation.com/how-short-form-videos-could-be-harming-young-minds-271159

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Beng Huat See, Professor of Education Research, School of Education, University of Birmingham

The Scottish government recently announced plans to pilot a four-day school week. The proposal comes amid growing concerns about teacher supply and wellbeing.

Teaching remains one of the most stressful occupations in the UK, with stress, exhaustion and burnout consistently cited as major reasons for staff leaving the profession. Creating supportive cultures and cost-effective wellbeing strategies therefore remains a key challenge for school leaders.

A “true” four-day work week, as advocated for by the Four-Day Week Foundation, involves the meaningful reduction of working time as well as days. This means that working time will typically be reduced to 28-32 hours per week worked over four days. Importantly, this change is made without a reduction in pay and with expectations that overall productivity levels are maintained.

Trials across 61 UK organisations show that four-day work weeks, when implemented as genuine working-time reductions, can improve work-life balance, reduce stress and cut employee absence. Research from Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the USA also report positive effects on wellbeing, job satisfaction and retention from adoption of the four-day work week. These studies also suggest that working-time reductions do not harm productivity.

But teaching still lags behind the wider workforce on flexible working. Many schools struggle to accommodate it. Unlike many office-based roles, schools must maintain fixed timetables, ensure pupil supervision and meet staffing ratios, which limits flexibility.

The proposal by the Scottish government differs from a “true” four-day week in that it does not reduce teachers’ overall hours but redistributes them. Teachers would work part of their planning, preparation and assessment time off-site, with only four days used for teaching.

Research by one of us (Daniel Wheatley, with colleagues at the University of Birmingham) from the Four-Day Work Week Project offers useful insights from work models that do not involve reductions in hours. We have found that models of the four-day work week where hours are not reduced, and ones where working on the fifth day remains in place, are linked to high work intensity and lesser practical benefits: employees are not able to disconnect from work fully.

However, research by one of us (Beng Huat See, with colleagues at Durham University and the University of Birmingham) which has examined 18 countries, indicates that the key factor contributing to stress is not the statutory working hours, but the amount of classroom contact time. Countries where teachers have high overall hours but fewer teaching hours report fewer shortages. This suggests that the most exhausting element of teaching is the intensity of instructing and managing pupils, rather than administrative or preparatory tasks.

If reducing contact hours helps alleviate stress, then a four-day teaching week, or models that redistribute teaching time such as the proposal in Scotland, could potentially improve wellbeing and retention.

Although four-day work weeks have been adopted in some international school systems, evidence of impacts on wellbeing, retention and pupil outcomes remains limited. Most existing research has been based on people’s perceptions of the scheme rather than measurable outcomes. These could include comparing absentee rates, turnover rates of teachers and student outcomes before and after the introduction of flexible working.

The Scottish pilot therefore offers an important opportunity to generate robust evidence. In England, the Education Endowment Foundation, a research charity funded by the government, is also trialling a nine-day working fortnight and an off-site planning, preparation and assessment model, but results are not yet available.

Flexible working in practice

Whether flexible working hours are feasible in practice depends on several factors. Large academy trusts often find it easier to implement this kind of working because they can deploy staff across multiple sites, allowing less rigid timetabling than a single school can manage. Primary schools also have more capacity for flexible models because they rely less on specialist subject teaching.

Cultural change is as important as logistical change. Research from non-profit Timewise emphasises that supportive leadership is crucial. Without it, flexible arrangements remain inconsistent or inaccessible. This means that implementing a four-day week is not a simple organisational tweak.

A four-day week is not a quick fix, then, but it may be worth trying.

The Scottish government’s pilot is an ambitious step that reflects a growing recognition of the need to address teacher workload. But successful implementation will require sufficient staffing and resourcing, and a shift in leadership practice and school cultures.

Reducing the intensity of classroom contact time may be crucial to tackling stress and preventing burnout. The existing evidence base does present a cautionary tale in that adoption of work models that do not involve a meaningful reduction in working time have so far been much less successful. Nevertheless, the Scottish pilot offers a rare opportunity to test whether rethinking working patterns can improve teacher wellbeing and retention.

Beng Huat See receives funding from Economic and Social Research Council.

She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

Daniel Wheatley is an Academic Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, Fellow of the Regional Studies Association and member of the Association for Heterodox Economics and British Sociological Association.

– ref. Will Scotland’s planned four-day week for teachers work? – https://theconversation.com/will-scotlands-planned-four-day-week-for-teachers-work-271166

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Claire Hart, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Southampton

We spend a huge part of our social lives online. Over five billion people scroll, post and comment on social media every day, using these platforms to keep in touch, share experiences and express themselves. Yet social media is often blamed for making us lonelier, more anxious and more competitive.

Our research team at the University of Southampton wanted to test whether this overwhelmingly negative narrative tells the full story. Instead of asking only what social media does to us, we asked a different question: under what conditions does sharing online actually help our relationships?

To answer this, we conducted a systematic review of almost two decades of research on two core online behaviours: self-disclosure (sharing personal information, thoughts or feelings) and self-presentation (managing the image we project to others). Across 57 publications and 73 individual studies, a clear pattern emerged: online sharing can strengthen relationships but only when it is perceived as genuine, appropriate and socially attuned.

People have always managed how they appear to others. What social media adds is scale, speed and visibility. A single post can be seen by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people, from close friends to complete strangers.

Both self-disclosure and self-presentation serve important social functions. Sharing personal experiences can deepen friendships and invite support. Presenting achievements or milestones can reinforce feelings of status and belonging. Problems arise not because these processes exist, but because they become exaggerated, misjudged or mismatched to the audience.

What the evidence actually shows

Across the studies we reviewed, people who shared more about their lives online consistently felt more socially connected. Even short, everyday updates increased feelings of belonging and reduced loneliness – whether or not the posts received visible feedback.

From the audience side, people felt emotionally closer to those who disclosed more frequently and more meaningfully. These effects were not limited to close friends; even weak ties often strengthened through regular, low-stakes sharing.

Crucially, online sharing helps fulfil two fundamental social motives. One is affiliation: the need for closeness, warmth and acceptance. The second is status: the need to feel valued, admired or socially visible. Positive, sincere self-disclosure supported both. In contrast, posting that was clearly designed to impress, brag or exaggerate often undermined liking, even when it attracted superficial engagement such as likes.

One of the most robust findings from the review was the importance of perceived authenticity. Across multiple experiments, people rated targets as more trustworthy, likeable and socially attractive when their photos were candid rather than heavily posed or edited. Filtered selfies and highly polished images tended to reduce perceived genuineness, and with it, social warmth.

The same pattern appeared in written posts. Balanced, everyday content – think “Long day but finally home with a cup of tea. Nice to slow down and enjoy the small comforts” – elicited more positive responses than overt self-promotion, for example “Another huge win today — feeling unstoppable lately! Hard work really does beat talent 💪✨”. Across studies, people were consistently more liked when they appeared real rather than strategic.

This does not mean people reject positivity. Positive posts were generally associated with more likes, friendlier comments and higher interpersonal attraction. But highly curated positivity, especially when it signalled superiority, luxury or flawless success, often triggered scepticism rather than admiration.

When sharing backfires

The review also showed that more disclosure is not always better. Highly intimate or strongly negative posts were often judged as inappropriate when shared publicly, particularly among acquaintances. These posts may attract attention but not necessarily liking or trust.

Negative posts showed an important asymmetry. They tended to receive fewer likes, but more private messages and emotional support. In other words, distress expressed online does not go ignored — but the support often moves behind the scenes. What matters most is whether the disclosure appears sincere rather than performative.

Not everyone uses social media in the same way. Traits such as narcissism and attachment style shape both how people post and how others respond. Narcissistic users, for example, tended to post more frequently and more self-promotional content.

While this often increased visibility, it did not reliably increase genuine liking or closeness. By contrast, people with secure attachment styles, who were comfortable with intimacy and trust, were more likely to use social media in ways that sustain real relationships.

Context matters just as much. Close friends responded differently from acquaintances. A disclosure that strengthens closeness in an intimate relationship may feel awkward or excessive when directed at distant contacts. Platforms also differ: what feels normal on Instagram may not work on LinkedIn or X.

Most previous research, and most public debate, has focused on the harms of social media: addiction, social comparison, anxiety and loneliness. These are real concerns. But they coexist with a parallel reality: people continue to use social media because it meets genuine social needs.

Our aim was to identify what actually works in online relating. We wanted to move beyond simplistic “good” versus “bad” narratives and offer a more precise account of how digital connection succeeds or fails. The practical implications are less about posting more or less, and more about how and why we share. Posts perceived as genuine consistently outperform those seen as strategic.

In summary, positive content attracts visibility; sincere vulnerability attracts support. Extremely intimate disclosures are best reserved for closer relationships.
Heavily filtered or exaggerated self-presentation often weakens trust.

Social media is neither inherently toxic nor inherently connective. It amplifies whatever social signals we send through it. When those signals align with honesty, emotional awareness and relational context, online self-disclosure can strengthen, rather than strain, our relationships.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Online sharing can push us apart – but when it’s authentic it can bring us together – https://theconversation.com/online-sharing-can-push-us-apart-but-when-its-authentic-it-can-bring-us-together-271547