B. J. Fogg

Brian Jeffrey Fogg (born August 7, 1963) is an American social scientist and author who is a research associate and adjunct professor at Stanford University. He is the founder and director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab, formerly known as the Persuasive Technology Lab. Education Fogg was born in 1963 in Dallas. He later grew up in Fresno, California, where he was raised in a Mormon family with six siblings. At the age of eighteen, Fogg went to Peru for a two-year mission. Fogg has a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in English from Brigham Young University. He earned a second Masters and a PhD in Communications from Stanford, where he served as a teaching assistant to Philip Zimbardo. Career From 1992 to 1993, Fogg was "one of the founders of the Student Review, Brigham Young University's independent student newspaper" and "taught English and design at BYU." While at BYU, Fogg published eight short stories and poems in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought; Sunstone, "a quarterly journal of Mormon experience, scholarship, issues, and art"; and other Mormon-affiliated publications. His Masters thesis, "Terms of Address Among Latter-Day Saints" and "Names Mormons Use for Jesus: Contexts and Trends" were both published by the Deseret Language and Linguistics Society Symposium in February 1990 and March 1991, respectively. In 1998, Fogg published a peer-reviewed paper, Persuasive Computers: Perspectives and Research Directions, which included a section that "proposes ethical responsibilities for designers of persuasive computers and captology researchers, and discusses the importance of educating about persuasion."