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The truth about the controversial science that has everyone worried
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When I was a teenager, my parents often asked me to come along to the store to help
carry groceries. One day, as I was waiting patiently at the check-out, my mother
reached for her brand new customer loyalty card. Out of curiosity, I asked the cashier
what information they record. He replied that it helps them keep track of what we’re
buying so that they can make tailored product recommendations. None of us knew
about this. I wondered whether mining through millions of customer purchases could
reveal hidden consumer preferences and it wasn’t long before the implications dawned
on me: are they mailing us targeted ads?
This was almost two decades ago. I suppose the question most of us are worried about
today is not all that different: how effective are micro-targeted messages? Can
psychological “big data” be leveraged to make you buy products? Or, even more
concerning, can such techniques be weaponized to influence the course of history,
such as the outcomes of elections? On one hand, we’re faced with daily news from
insiders attesting to the danger and effectiveness of micro-targeted messages based on
unique “psychographic” profiles of millions of registered voters. On the other hand,
academic writers, such as Brendan Nyhan, warn that the political power of targeted
online ads and Russian bots are widely overblown.
In an attempt to take stock of what psychological science has to say about this, I think
it is key to disentangle two prominent misunderstandings that cloud this debate.
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In a follow-up study, researchers showed that such digital footprints can in fact be
leveraged for mass persuasion. Across three studies with over 3.5 million people, they
found that psychologically tailored advertising, i.e. matching the content of a
persuasive message to an individuals’ broad psychographic profile, resulted in 40%
more clicks and in 50% more online purchases than mismatched or unpersonalized
messages. This is not entirely new to psychologists: we have long known that tailored
communications are more persuasive than a one-size-fits all approach. Yet, the
effectiveness of large-scale digital persuasion can vary greatly and is sensitive to
context. After all, online shopping is not the same thing as voting!
So do we know whether targeted fake news helped swing the election to Donald
Trump?
Political commentators are skeptical and for good reason: compared to a new
shampoo, changing people’s minds on political issues is much harder and many
academic studies on political persuasion show small effects. One of the first studies on
fake news exposure combined a fake news database of 156 articles with a national
survey of Americans, and estimated that the average adult was exposed to just one or a
few fake news articles before the election. Moreover, the researchers argue that
exposure would only have changed vote shares in the order of hundredths of a
percentage point. Yet, rather than digital footprints, the authors mostly relied on self-
reported persuasion and recall of 15 selected fake news articles.
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In contrast, other research combing national survey data with individual browser
histories estimates that about 25% of American adults (65 million) visited a fake news
site in the final weeks of the election. The authors report that most of the fake news
consumption was Pro-Trump, however, and heavily concentrated among a small
ideological subgroup.
Interestingly, a recent study presented 585 former Barack Obama voters with one of
three popular fake news stories (e.g. that Hillary Clinton was in poor health and
approved weapon sales to Jihadists). The authors found that, controlling for other
factors, such as whether respondents liked or disliked Clinton and Trump, former
Obama voters who believed one or more of the fake news articles were 3.9 times more
likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016, including abstention. Thus, rather
than focusing on just voter persuasion, this correlational evidence hints at the
possibility that fake news might also lead to voter suppression. This makes sense in
that the purpose of fake news is often not to convince people of “alternative facts,” but
rather to sow doubt and to disengage people politically, which can undermine the
democratic process, especially when society’s future hinges on small differences in
voting preferences.
In fact, the second common misunderstanding revolves around the impact of “small”
effects: small effects can have big consequences. For example, in a 61-million-person
experiment published in Nature, researchers show that political mobilization
messages delivered to Facebook users directly impacted the voting behavior of
millions of people. Importantly, the effect of social transmission was greater than the
direct effect of the messages themselves. Notably, the voter persuasion rate in that
study, was around 0.39%, which seems really small, but it actually translates into
282,000 extra votes cast. If you think about major elections, such as Brexit (51.9% vs.
48.1%) or the fact that Hillary ultimately lost the election by about 77,000 votes,
contextually, such small effects suddenly matter a great deal.
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Thus, given the lack of transparency, the privatized nature of these models, and
commercial interests to over-claim or downplay their effectiveness, we must remain
cautious in our conclusions. The rise of Big Data offers many potential benefits for
society and my colleagues and I have tried help establish ethical guidelines for the use
of Big Data in behavioral science as well as help inoculate and empower people to
resist mass psychological persuasion. But if anything is clear, it’s the fact that we are
constantly being micro-targeted based on our digital footprints, from book
recommendations to song choices to what candidate you’re going to vote for. For
better or worse, we are now all unwitting participants in what is likely going to be the
world’s largest behavioral science experiment.
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