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I podcast, so I'm used to restarting my [laughter] sentences. Hi, I'm Sophie Jabar. I'm a new
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assistant professor in the legal studies and business ethics department with a secondary appointment in philosophy. I'm
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from Boulder, Colorado, but I spent most of the last 12 years living in and around Boston. My research focus is on
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the ethics of influencing people's behavior. So, topics like manipulation, coercion, blackmail, and deception. My
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interest in this topic actually goes back to college. So I wrote my senior thesis on the idea of nudge policies.
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Policies that unlike taxes or bans don't impose sort of significant costs on
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people as a result of their behavior, but they rather just nudge them in the right direction by using insights from
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behavioral psychology. And back when I was writing about this, critics were worried that these policies were not
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only wrongfully paternalistic but also manipulative. and I became interested in whether that was true and more generally
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what we can and can't do to influence people's [music] behavior. I think what
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I'm most excited about coming to Wharton is working with my colleagues in legal
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studies and business ethics, [music] especially those with a background in law, which I myself don't have. I think
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there's a lot that we can learn from, especially things [music] like the ways
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in which we regulate deception in advertising and marketing. [music] There are lots of interesting lines that we
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draw there which might tell us something about the ethics of deception in everyday life.