Transcriber: Thanasis Zantrimas Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
I want to take you back with me for a minute
to December 3, 2016.
A Saturday that probably doesn't mean anything to most of you,
but one that I actually remember very clearly.
And that's because I woke up to something like this:
way too many e-mails for a regular Saturday.
My first thought was, "What the hell did I do last night?"
(Laughter)
It took me a few seconds to realize that obviously I hadn't done anything,
because at the time I was in the final stages
of writing up my PhD,
and my only two friends were Microsoft Word and my Nespresso machine.
So luckily, it wasn't the aftermath of a crazy night out;
it was just a news story here.
The story of a company called Cambridge Analytica,
which had created detailed psychological profiles
of millions of US citizens during the 2016 presidential election.
And they had allegedly used those profiles to target voters
with Facebook ads that were highly personalized
and essentially designed to discourage them
from going to the ballots and putting in their vote for Hillary Clinton.
Now, I knew that the audio was going to come out,
and I knew that it was going to have my name in it,
not because I was in any way related to Cambridge Analytica -
I want to make that very clear -
but because I was one of the first scientists
to study psychological targeting.
I spent hours on the phone with one of the journalists
trying to help them write the story and understand the science behind it.
So I knew it was going to come out,
but I had no idea that it would literally blow up
and become one of the most widely read articles around the world.
Now, I don't want to talk about Cambridge Analytica today,
and that's just because we simply don't know what happened there
and we probably never will.
However, we do know that technology of psychological targeting exists
and that more and more companies are using it.
And I know that because I get e-mails every single day from people
who either want to start a business in that context
or who want to use psychological targeting within their own organization.
So instead of wasting my time on Cambridge Analytica,
what I want to do is demystify psychological targeting for you
by doing three things:
I want to explain how psychological targeting works;
how effective it is;
and most importantly, think with you about how we as a society
might want to use it.
Because the reason I'm doing this research is not because I want to help companies
squeeze every last penny out of their customers;
it's because we truly have to understand
we have to develop an objective and scientific understanding
of psychological targeting
if we want to engage policy makers, business leaders,
and frankly, everybody who is willing to listen
in a conversation how to manage it effectively.
How does psychological targeting work?
Which essentially boils down
to the question of "How can we assess the psychology of millions of people
in order to target them with personalized ads?"
And up to a few years ago, the only way we could measure psychological traits
was using questionnaires like this one here,
where I would essentially ask people
to tell us how much they agree with different statements,
and then based on their responses,
we would conclude that they were extroverted or more introverted.
And this works perfectly well in the context of a research study
were you survey a few hundred people,
but you can imagine there is just no way
that you can get millions of people
complete one of these questionnaires for 10 to 20 minutes
before you show them the right ad.
So the question is really, If we can't ask people directly,
how else can we indirectly glean their psychological characteristics?
The answer is this:
we look at their digital footprint.
And what I mean by that are all their traces that you leave online
on a daily basis.
It's what you share on Facebook,
it's the cookies that keep track of the websites you visit,
what you post on Twitter, what you buy with your credit card,
all the way to what you listen to on Spotify.
And you can imagine that all these traces combined
can actually tell us a lot about your habits,
your preferences, your needs,
essentially, who you are as a person.
So what can we learn about people's psychology
by looking at these digital footprints?
I'm just going to show you a few simple but very powerful examples
from research of my colleagues and myself
in the context of Facebook.
You have to trust me that we can assimilate insights
from pretty much any type of digital footprint that's out there.
Okay, so what you see here are the words in people's Facebook posts
that are most strongly related to having an extroverted personality,
so a tendency to be outgoing and social.
And you can see extroverts,
they talk about parties, weekends, girls, exciting,
so all the fun and exciting stuff that you do with friends.
Now, if you contrast that
to the words that are most strongly related ...
(Laughter)
with having an introverted personality,
so a tendency to be more reserved and quiet,
you can see that the picture looks very different.
Introverts talk about internet, anime, manga, computer,
all the stuff that you typically do by yourself.
Now, the next one is one of my favorites;
it's the words that are most strongly associated
with having an agreeable personality,
which is the tendency to be caring and trusting.
And you can see agreeable people talk about blessed,
thanksgiving, wonderful.
So there's this warm glow to it.
A word of warning:
the word cloud for people who have a disagreeable personality,
which means they are more critical and competitive,
looks very different.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And we are not cherry picking.
So you can do the same thing for the Facebook pages
that people can like and follow,
and you can see that picture is again very intuitive.
But most importantly, these very simple relationships
between someone's digital footprints and their psychology
is all we need to actually apply psychological targeting,
using existing targeting tools.
Because what Facebook, for example, allows you to do
is target people not only based on social demographic variables,
like age, gender, location,
but also based on interests.
And because interests are inherently related to psychological traits,
Facebook effectively also allows you to target people or audiences
of different psychological profiles.
Now, that brings us to the second question:
Can we really influence people's behavior
by targeting them based on their psychological profile?
Is psychological targeting really effective?
And the answer is yes.
I'm going to show you the results of one of my studies,
but we've tested this in many different contexts,
and the results are always very similar.
In this particular case, we teamed up with a beauty retailer in the UK,
and we advertized the online store.
Our goal was to get women to click on an ad,
go to the store and then purchase something.
And we created extroverted ads and introverted ads.
So the extroverted ads look like this one here.
There are several people having a good time -
really playing with the need of extroverts to socialize
and to be the center of attention.
Introverted ads look different.
It was, like, usually one person in front of the mirror -
playing with the need of introverts
to have some quiet time for themselves.
We then advertized all of the ads
to both extroverted and introverted audiences on Facebook,
using this interest based and targeting functionality
that I showed you before.
And we measured simply purchases on the beauty retailer's website.
And here's what we found.
People in the mismatching conditions,
they did purchase.
Sure, it was appetizing.
But people in the matching conditions
were about 50 percent more likely to make a purchase.
So extroverts were more likely to make a purchase
if they saw the extroverted ad,
and introverts were more likely to purchase
when they saw the introverted ad.
And that's pretty astonishing.
Because this is really the simplest manipulation possible.
The only aspect of the user's journey that we customized
was the ad that people saw.
And we used a relatively crude measure of approach to profile people.
There's machine learning algorithms out there today,
and they do a much better job at profiling people
and are more accurate
than what we have followed here in this case.
One of my colleagues, for example,
showed that computers are roughly as accurate at predicting your personality
as your spouse is -
just by looking at your Facebook likes.
They are better than work colleagues, better than friends,
and they are even better than family members.
So if you compare what we've done here
to what the future is likely to hold,
psychological targeting is only going to be more effective
in the years to come.
And even then,
I think it's really just the beginning of something much bigger.
Just look at this comparison here.
The election of the pope in 2005,
and the election of the pope in 2013.
You are all carrying around your smartphones almost 24/7,
which means that you can be tracked almost continuously in real time
and that one cannot only make inferences about your psychological traits,
but also the mood you're in,
the place you're in, the context you're in.
So you're no longer just an extrovert;
you're now an extrovert who's in a good mood,
having a good time with friends in a park.
And even that pales in comparison
to what I think the future is going to hold.
At some point, we would have chips in our body
that measure our physiology,
or we're going to wear contact lenses like these,
which not only capture everything that's happening around you
but also shape your perception of reality
by displaying hyper-personalized content to you -
which means that my reality
at some point might be entirely different to yours.
If we consider all of this,
it's not really surprising that the public's initial reaction
to psychological targeting, in the context of Cambridge Analytica,
was a very negative one.
Some media outlets have even gone as far as calling psychological targeting
a threat to democracy.
Now, I want to pause for a second
and consider a different scenario.
Let's imagine that not Donald Trump, but Hillary Clinton
had used psychological targeting in her campaign.
Not to create fear
and not to discourage people from voting
but to actually encourage them to engage,
like, trying to truly understand what they care about
and to communicate with them in a way
that makes someone to be part of the political landscape again.
I'm sure that the public perception would have been a very different one.
My point is that psychological targeting isn't evil per se.
It's really about how we use it.
As much as psychological targeting can pose a threat in the wrong hands,
it could also provide a solution to what in my opinion
might be an even bigger threat to democracy,
and that's disengagement.
If 40 percent of people in the US
decide to stay home and not vote,
then this defeats the very idea, the very notion of democracy,
where everybody engages.
And because psychological targeting really is all about understanding
and engaging with people on a personal level,
I think that it could actually help us save democracy.
Now, we might collectively decide that we don't want psychological targeting
anywhere near our democratic process,
and that's okay.
Because elections are really just one context out of many
in which psychological targeting could be valuable
and could act as a catalyst for social good.
My students and I are currently working on a number of projects
where we're using psychological targeting to try help people live better lives.
So for example,
we try to help people save more by identifying personalized saving goals;
we're also trying to help young people find fulfilling careers
by having job recommendations that match their psychological motivations,
and we're trying to help people
who suffer from depression or other mental illnesses
to get the personalized support they need
by identifying and detecting symptoms early
using smartphone sensing technology.
And this is really just a snapshot of what's possible;
the list here is almost endless.
So what I hope that you take away from this talk today
is really that psychological targeting is a new reality.
It's out there and it's effective.
And for me, personally, this is as exciting as it is scary.
Because psychological targeting really provides amazing opportunities,
but it also poses some pretty serious challenges.
So what that means is that we all have to engage in the topic.
We all have to advocate for an ethical use,
and we all have to show the people
who have the power to make decisions and drive change
that we care.
Thank you.
(Applause)