Part of my series on democracy in the digital age : https://wordpress.com/post/faustusanalytics.wordpress.com/222
In the run up to the 2016 US presidential elections, Democrats consoled themselves with the mantra “Demography is Destiny” (Barron 2016). The idea was that demographics would vote in their rational interests against Donald Trump, who consistently insulted women and minorities. To win, Trump had to bypass rationality. Unfortunately, we humans are not that rational, to begin with, and new technologies take advantage of that.
Think of the last time you signed up for something online, did you do the rational thing and even look at the terms? Or did you scroll down to that little box to get on with your sign up? A system like this would work and protect people if we read the fine print, but we don’t. Like political campaigns, health campaigns, like AIDs prevention or smoking prevention assume that if we’re told about all the risks, we’ll do a quick cost-benefit analysis and stop negative behaviors. A 2009 study in the journal Health Psychology (Lawton et all 2009) tested whether feelings or rational choices were better predictors of what we would do in the future and found that feelings largely trumped rational choice. People don’t do what they think is right- they do what feels right.
New technologies allow politicians and the firms they hire to target the “what feels right” behind the decisions people make. People freely give their data to Facebook, Twitter, Google and thousands of other websites. This data can be used to create a psychometric profile. A psychometric profile brings together personality traits, like OCEAN scores- a measure of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and natural reactions. The London-based PR firm, Cambridge Analytica, used psychometric profiles to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election. They sent out thousands of surveys to create psychometric profiles on voters, and then extrapolated the psychometric profiles of the entire US by looking at people with similar internet habits to those they had psychometric profiles on (Talbot 2016). This allowed them to use behavioral micro-targeting- producing advertisements tailored to individual voters. For example, with gun rights, voters deemed neurotic and conscientious were sent advertisement’s emphasizing how guns could be used to fight burglars. Voters deemed closed and agreeable were sent advertisements about passing on guns as a tradition (Concordia 2016).
This targeting of emotion allows politicians to bypass voters’ rational side, but in doing so challenges a fundamental assumption of democracy- the idea that voters are rational. A rational voter votes for the politician with the best policies. An irrational voter votes for the politician with the most compelling message. While once, the compelling message had to be grounded in truth, new technologies allow politicians to spew so many alternate truths that people do not know what to believe- choosing the most compelling message.
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