Promoted as transformative of personal lifestyles and broader socio-environmental strategies, smart homes often deliver material change without disrupting entrenched social norms. As such, they tend to reinforce existing social structures instead of challenging or reforming them. This article presents the first cross-disciplinary critical review of 92 smart home publications to evaluate the extent to which gender has been meaningfully addressed in this field. Using qualitative content analysis across disciplines, four dominant analytical strands were identified, and only 19% of studies adopt constructivist or intersectional approaches to gender, while the majority treat it as a binary demographic variable. Only 12% of studies engage in discourse analysis to interrogate how smart home narratives reproduce heteronormative assumptions and gendered divisions of labour. Technical and quantitatively oriented research largely ignores gendered dynamics, reinforcing assumptions of neutrality in smart technology design. Authors argue that this lack of engagement with gender—as well as with intersecting categories such as race, class, and disability—limits the field’s conceptual richness and social responsiveness. The findings underscore the urgent need for more inclusive and reflective methodological frameworks and offer practical guidance for integrating gender-sensitive approaches into future smart home research, design, and policy.
Although honesty is vital for trust and stability, individuals in romantic relationships may sometimes favor deception over harsh truths. This study examines the relationship between relationship satisfaction, resilience, and the preference for hearing prosocial lies from a romantic partner. We hypothesized that prosocial lies may be positively linked to relationship satisfaction, especially for less resilient individuals who rely on positive feed- back to manage stress. First, we piloted scenarios depicting prosocial and egoistic lies in romantic relationships. Next, individuals (N = 672) chose whether they preferred their partner to lie or tell the truth. Results showed that lower relationship satisfaction was associated with a greater preference for hearing prosocial lies. This association was mediated by perceiving truth as harmful at mean and high levels of emotional resilience, indicating that prosocial lies are less desired in satisfying relationships but preferred in strained ones.
This editorial introduces the special issue Living with Smart Technologies: The Changing Dynamics of Digitalized Domesticity, which examines how digital technologies are becoming embedded in everyday domestic life and how they reconfigure its socio-cultural dynamics. Developed in connection with the SMARTUP project, the issue approaches the smart home not primarily as a technological artefact but rather as a socio-cultural phenomenon through which everyday domestic life, meanings, and power relations are reshaped. Bringing together the perspectives of sociology and cultural studies, the editorial foregrounds the challenges related to smart domesticity, the plural meanings of “smartness,” and the ways smart technologies intersect with axes of difference. In introducing the contributions, the editorial departs from technocentric accounts; instead, it asks how domestic technologies reorganize routines, household coordination, labor, and power relations at home. It also calls for a critical assessment of smartification beyond mere functionality. Such an assessment would remain attentive to the failures and trade-offs of smartification and to its capacity to unsettle assumptions about both homes and technology.
