Are You Multitasking Your Life Away? Cliff Nass at TEDxStanford

Clifford Nass gleans powerful strategies to help people build relationships by watching what succeeds and what fails in human interfaces with technology. In his research at Stanford, Clifford Nass has leveraged people’s fundamentally social relationship with computers to develop and test essential rules for effective human relationships. The Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University, Nass is author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships. Nass discovered that people use the same rules and heuristics when interacting with computers, automobiles, cellphones, robots and other interactive technology as they do when interacting with other people. His paper demonstrating that heavy media multitaskers are poor at multitasking was one of the most covered papers in the social sciences in the last 12 months. He has applied his research to over 250 media products and services for companies including Microsoft, BMW, Time-Warner, Hewlett-Packard and Charles Schwab.