the psychologist may 2018 news Or simply a case of a psychologist providing data to a company who then use it to overpromise and under-deliver?
What’s special about ‘psychographic profiles’?
As Sasha Issenberg reported for Bloomberg in 2015, ‘Cambridge Analytica’s trophy product is “psychographic profiles” of every potential voter in the U.S. interwoven with more conventional political data. The emphasis on psychology helps to differentiate the Brits from other companies that specialized in “microtargeting,” a catchall term typically used to describe any analysis that uses statistical modeling to predict voter intent at the individual level. Such models predicting an individual’s attitudes or behavior are typically situational – many voters’ likelihood of casting a ballot dropped off significantly from 2012 to 2014, after all, and their odds of supporting a Republican might change if the choice shifted from Mitt Romney to Scott Brown. [Cambridge Analytica CEO] Nix offered to layer atop those predictions of political behavior an assessment of innate attributes like extroversion that were unlikely to change with the electoral calendar.’ Many are sceptical that such an approach actually works. Eitan Hersh, who wrote the 2015 book Hacking the Electorate, said that ‘Every claim about psychographics etc. made by or about the firm is BS… “Let’s start with fb data, use it to predict personalities, then use that to predict political views, and then use that to figure out messages and messengers and just the right time of a campaign to make a lasting persuasive impact” ...sounds like a failed PhD prospectus to me.’ New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel tweeted: ‘BIGGEST SECRET ABOUT CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA: It was (& is) an overpriced service that delivered little value to the TRUMP campaign, & the other campaigns & PACs that retained it – most of which hired the firm because it was seen as a prerequisite for receiving $$$ from [important Republican donor family] the MERCERS.’ In a Wired piece titled ‘The noisy fallacies of psychographic targeting’, Antonio Garcia Martinez wrote ‘the aspiring psychograficist (if that’s even a thing) is now making two predictive leaps to arrive at a voter target: guessing about individual political inclinations based on rather metaphysical properties like “conscientiousness”; and predicting what sort of Facebook user behaviors are also common among people with that same psychological quality. It’s two noisy predictors chained together, which is why psychographics have never been used much for Facebook ads targeting, though people have tried.’ Indeed, he notes that ‘Most ad insiders express skepticism about Cambridge Analytica’s claims of having influenced the election, and stress the real-world difficulty of changing anyone’s mind about anything with mere Facebook ads, least of all deeply ingrained political views.’ Others (including the historian Heidi Tworek) have written that fears of manipulation by new media are as old as mass media themselves, and ‘we’re back to the old new vision of crowd psychology and mass psychosis
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popularized by Gustave Le Bon in 1895’. Brendan Nyhan, a Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, pointed to a recent meta-analysis of numerous different forms of campaign persuasion, including in-person canvassing and mail, finding that their average effect in general elections is zero. Yet there is recent research (led by Sandra Matz) showing the effectiveness of these techniques in purchasing behaviour. With politics seemingly becoming more populist by the day, perhaps it’s just a matter of time before our voting behaviour is swayed in the same way. And some have argued that we’re looking for effects in the wrong place. Tom Stafford (University of Sheffield) said ‘My view is that persuasion effects are probably the wrong place to look… mobilisation effects (or the dark pattern alternative – influencing people not to vote) are probably where the action is.’
The tip of the iceberg?
One thing is for sure: the Cambridge Analytica scandal may end up being only the first of countless similar cases. Facebook has allowed third-party app developers to access private user data since 2007. How many of them cached the data and made their own private databases? Where is that data now, and how might it be used? Some psychologists we spoke to are concerned about this, and surprised the case isn’t making more waves within the discipline. Stafford told us: ‘When news of this broke in 2015, UK psychology was mostly silent: in marked contrast to many other scandals. Perhaps we weren’t au fait with the new frontiers in ethics that big data/social media are opening up. If that’s the case, we need to get up to speed… not only are many academics deeply involved in business, but social science research is itself perhaps moving to tech firms, which have the data and resources to do things that academics would like to do.’ Joseph Devlin (University College London) agreed. ‘I’m baffled about why the Cambridge Analytica affair didn’t even seem to penetrate most people’s awareness, especially among professional psychology researchers in the UK. It was, after all, “one of us” who seemed to have perpetrated this data collection, and he was based at one of the top universities in the world’ (although the University of Cambridge have now issued a statement distancing themselves from Kogan’s work). Yet some key figures have voiced their concerns. Michal Kosinski, psychologist, data scientist and now Professor at Stanford University, worked with Kogan and was reportedly the first academic approached by Cambridge Analytica. His internal emails from May 2014 suggest he described Kogan’s approach to the research as ‘highly unethical’ and warned that ‘this situation is really disturbing to the culture of our department and destroys the good name of the university’. In an interview with us last year, Kosinski had said: ‘I will stick to teaching and researching at Stanford – consultancy doesn’t interest me much.’ In that interview, he also voiced his concerns over the potential for Facebook to manipulate democracy: ‘The big problem is that in the past, editorial policy was obvious. You could see if you were looking at a left-leaning
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