Skip down to main content

Professor Andrew Przybylski

Professor of Human Behaviour and Technology
Andrew Przybylski

Professor
Andrew Przybylski

Professor of Human Behaviour and Technology

About

I am a research psychologist who studies human motivation, health, and well-being in the digital age. I am curious about how our minds navigate the shifting boundaries between analogue and digital environments. Since 2011 – the beginning of the replication crisis in psychology – I have been interested in how different attempts to improve the behavioral sciences might sharpen or obscure how we understand life in an increasingly connected world.

More recently, some amazing charities and the UK government have supported my involvement in research probing this. These projects are all about looking at how different scientific approaches using data from surveys, health data, brain scans, online platforms, and video games could teach us something valuable about how humans play, socialise, and thrive.

As an undergraduate at the University of Rochester in New York, I enjoyed studying psychology, religion and classics. Later, I was honored to continue my education at Rochester with Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Together with clinical psychologist C. Scott Rigby we studied motivation, learning, immersion, and engagement in video games.

Areas of Interest for Doctoral Supervision

Digital well-being, online platform data donation, online trace data, online victimisation, social media, video games and mental health.  

Research Interests

Human motivation, mental health, open science, meta science  

Positions at the OII

  • Professor of Human Behaviour and Technology, August 2022 -
  • Director of Research, March 2018 - April 2022
  • Associate Professor, July 2017 - August 2022
  • Senior Research Fellow, December 2016 - August 2022
  • Research Fellow, September 2013 - December 2016

ICEBERG NOW PLAYING ICEBERG NOW PLAYING ICEBERG NOW PLAYING ICEBERG NOW PLAYING ICEBERG NOW PLAYING ICEBERG NOW PLAYING

Research

Integrity Statement

Professor Przybylski’s work is financially supported by UK Research and Innovation and the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/Y010736/1). In previous years, his research was funded by the ESRC, Huo Family Foundation, The British Academy, The Diana Award, The Leverhulme Trust, Barnardo’s, and the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund.

From 2022 until 2024, he served as a scientific advisor to the Sync Digital Wellbeing Program. In 2025, he provided advice to the Google Expert Advisory on Youth and Tech and the Open AI Expert Council on Well-Being and AI. In 2025, he provided advice to UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, funded research and analysis on Understanding the impact of smartphones and social media on children and young people (led by the University of Cambridge).

Professor Przybylski is a member of the UK’s Department for Culture, Media & Sport’s College of Experts, and he is now writing a book based on his research.

Professor Przybylski donates any fees from industry to charity and conducts his research in line with the University of Oxford’s academic integrity code of practice.

Privacy Overview
Oxford Internet Institute

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies
  • moove_gdrp_popup -  a cookie that saves your preferences for cookie settings. Without this cookie, the screen offering you cookie options will appear on every page you visit.

This cookie remains on your computer for 365 days, but you can adjust your preferences at any time by clicking on the "Cookie settings" link in the website footer.

Please note that if you visit the Oxford University website, any cookies you accept there will appear on our site here too, this being a subdomain. To control them, you must change your cookie preferences on the main University website.

Google Analytics

This website uses Google Tags and Google Analytics to collect anonymised information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. Keeping these cookies enabled helps the OII improve our website.

Enabling this option will allow cookies from:

  • Google Analytics - tracking visits to the ox.ac.uk and oii.ox.ac.uk domains

These cookies will remain on your website for 365 days, but you can edit your cookie preferences at any time via the "Cookie Settings" button in the website footer.