Robert Epstein

Work in psychology

In various writings, Epstein has been a strong advocate of the view that people can deliberately learn to love each other. He studied arranged marriages and found that in many of them the partners developed greater feelings of affection for each other than did couples who had married for love. In 2002 he published a study in which he said that many couples marry for other reasons than love, and develop love in their relationships over time. He gave students in one of his classes at University of California, San Diego extra credit for taking part in affection building exercises. At one time he used himself as an experimental subject to investigate this.

Epstein collected data from over 18,000 people via the Internet for a study on sexual orientation published in 2007. He found a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality that is skewed by societal influences. He also found that some people changed their orientation during their lives.

Epstein is also a scholar in the field of psychological maturity, and once published an online maturity test. He is critical of what he sees as the "artificial extension of childhood" over the past century, arguing that what society views as the "teen brain" is often the result of Western cultural factors and infantilization, rather than a set of brain characteristics that are inherent in all humans throughout their teen years. In certain essays, he has cited studies which found that some teenagers are in some ways more developmentally mature than most adults, and advocates giving young people more adult responsibility, as well as placing them in environments in which they will not be prone to socializing simply with other teenagers.

Criticism of Google

In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website. His website, which features mental health screening tests, was blocked for serving malware that could infect visitors to the site. Epstein emailed "Larry Page, Google's chief executive; David Drummond, Google’s legal counsel; Epstein's congressman; and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and Newsweek." In it, Epstein threatened legal action if the warning concerning his website was not removed, and denied that any problems with his website existed. Several weeks later, Epstein admitted his website had been hacked, but still criticized Google for tarnishing his name and not helping him find the infection. Epstein has since continued anti-Google advocacy, writing in TIME magazine that Google had "a fundamentally deceptive business model". Epstein also has said that Google could rig the 2016 US presidential election and that search engine manipulation was "a serious threat to the democratic system of government". According to Epstein, "Perhaps the most effective way to wield political influence in today’s high-tech world is to donate money to a candidate and then to use technology to make sure he or she wins. The technology guarantees the win, and the donation guarantees allegiance, which Google has certainly tapped in recent years with the Obama administration."

Throughout 2016, Epstein had discussed the possibility of Google search algorithm manipulation in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. He estimated in a September article that as many as three million votes in the upcoming election could be shifted as a result. His research on the issue has been called into question by many other outlets since. Former head of Google Search Amit Singhal has directly disputed this claim, explaining that "Google has never ever re-ranked search results on any topic (including elections) to manipulate user sentiment."

In a 2017 article, Epstein criticized efforts by companies such as Google and Facebook to suppress fake news through algorithms, noting "the dangers in allowing big technology companies to decide which news stories are legitimate."

Books