This journey began when I read Outnumbered: Exploring the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. It tells about the effects of technology and the Internet on our lives. “Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy, and what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits, and increasingly we are relinquishing our decision-making to algorithms.”
That seems scary, but one reassuring, and somewhat surprising, observation was that commercial and political discussions and arguments on social media and even those by professional persuaders like politicians and advertisers don’t do much to move us off our established positions. You’ll struggle to move someone from one side to the other no matter how good your data; a more likely reaction will be increased resistance (Democrat/Republican, Coke/Pepsi).
Next stop, The New York Review of Books. Here I found a review of The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, author of Money Ball and other best sellers. In it he “recounts the complex friendship and remarkable intellectual partnership of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the psychologists whose work has provided the foundation for the new behavioral science.” Their work is summarized in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) that gives numerous examples of how intuition, fast thinking, frequently leads us in the wrong direction. (I referred to this idea last Monday.)
Later in the article the reviewer begins to elaborate: “Lewis does not discuss the ways in which the same behavioral science can be used quite deliberately for the purposes of deception and manipulation, though this has been one of its most important applications.” But wait a minute! That idea would contradict the point mentioned above.
To support a premise that “Lewis does not discuss,” the reviewer spends several paragraphs worrying that Trump’s 2016 victory moved this new understanding of behavioral science from “making the world a better place” to “a darker story in the public mind…. News outlets have claimed that although Obama’s and Clinton’s teams both used social media, data analytics, and finely grained targeting to promote their message, Trump’s team, according to Forbes, ‘delved into message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning.’… If this sinister level of manipulation seems far-fetched, it nevertheless reflects the boasts of Cambridge Analytica, the company they employed to do this for them.”
The implication is that this must be take very seriously, but four paragraphs later the reviewer concedes that whether Cambridge Analytica did or even could do what they claimed consists primarily of a sales pitch.
Finally, I turned to Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. He believes that people are less gullible than we tend to think. We often hear stories of obvious scams involving Nigerian princes and prepaid debit cards, but, like plane crashes, these stories make the news because they are rare and shocking, not because they are common. Again, people tend to resist rather than blindly accept new ideas.
Mercier also uses Cambridge Analytica, which according to the Guardian newspaper “allowed democracy [to be] highjacked,” as an example. On page 139 he writes, “In fact it was a scam.” He goes on to say, “In reality, its influence was nil” and that the political analysts “never saw ‘any evidence that it worked’” feeling it was based on “pop psychology BS.”
Who do I trust about the power of persuasion generally or Cambridge Analytica’s (and Russian bots') past or future influence on US elections? I trust Sumpter and Mercier, not a NYBooks reviewer speculating on something the author didn’t discuss in the book, then hedging about how true it is. Experience and these authors teach me that swaying people through psychological manipulation is highly unlikely.
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