The Sustainability and Responsibility research area focuses primarily on the use of technologies that have a lasting impact on people's personal and professional lives. In addition to the usual instrumental topics (e.g. performance and adoption of technologies), humanistic topics (e.g. health and well-being of users and society) are addressed. This research area draws on positive psychology and addresses topics such as digital wellbeing, digital nudging, gamification, sustainability and ethical use of technologies. This also includes topics such as self-measurement and reflections with technologies and overcoming technological aberrations.

Possible research questions are:

• 
  How do people experience the increasing omnipresence of
  technologies? How do dependencies and other
  behavioral patterns arise in relation to technologies?
  
• 
  How do users create and overcome unwanted
  technological developments with their attitudes (e.g.
  mindfulness, identity change) and behaviors (e.g.
  self-measurements and reflections)? What concrete and
  easy-to-implement recommendations for theory and practice can
  be derived?
  
• 
  How can users be motivated and
  positively influenced with technologies, e.g. to eat better, move more
  and/or use fewer resources?
  

Selected publications:

Benlian, A., Pinski, M., Adam, M.(2025). Team-Enacted Use versus Developer-Needed Use of Agile Practices: How Perceptual (In-)Congruence and Team Feedback-Seeking Shape Developer Well-Being. Information Systems Research
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Wendt, C., Kosin, D., Adam, M. & Benlian, A. (2024). Sustainable energy consumption behaviour with smart meters: The role of relative performance and evaluative standards. Information Systems Journal
Link

Adam, M., Reinelt, A., & Roethke, K. (2023). Gamified monetary reward designs: Offering certain versus chance-based rewards.

Information Systems Journal
Link

Adam, M., Werner, D., Wendt, C., & Benlian, A. (2020). Containing Covid-19 through physical distancing:
The impact of real-time crowding information. European Journal of Information Systems, 29(5), 595-607
Link

Schneider, D., Klumpe, J., Adam, M. & Benlian, A. (2020). Nudging users into digital service solutions.
Electronic Markets, 30, 863-881
Link