On March 6th, 2017, Google launched a brilliant piece of persuasive technology to nudge users in the direction of empathizing with the plight of refugees. Google Fortunetelling was supposedly a beta program where you could pose a question about your future and Google would attempt to predict the answer. However, upon typing a letter or two, the search bar would auto-complete several questions that a refugee may have regarding their own future, such as “Will I be reunited with my family?” The power of this PT appears to lie in the juxtaposition of the relatively trivial questions you were thinking of posing and the incredibly serious questions that refugees face when thinking about their own future. This forces users to engage in perspective taking that is likely to lead to an increase in empathy, at least for those users who do not hold strong prejudicial feelings against refugees.
