How AI is using your data to influence you

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0:43And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, your data and you. But let's start with my data and me. Sandra, we have never met before, right? That's correct. And we've never spoken before. We've also never spoken before. Okay, but I asked you here, at least in part, because you have psychologically personality profiled me. I have. I did some snooping around your online life yesterday night, which was extremely fun to do. This is Sandra Matz. She is a computational social scientist at the Columbia University Business School.

1:42working at the intersection of psychology, computer science, and business. Sandra is an expert on our digital footprints, the data we leave behind that companies can piece together psychological profiles of us, which can then be used to target us with ads to try to influence how we'll behave. But as Sandra demonstrates, you don't need to be a big corporation to profile people these days. Yeah, so I've asked for support from ChatGPT to turn your tweets and social media posts into a Big Five personality profile. The Big Five are five traits. Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

2:30So the big five personality traits are really what psychologists in a way default back to when we try to explain how people think, feel and behave about the world. Oh, dear. OK, let's do it. What did you find? Let's do it. Here's what ChatGPD thinks about you just based on what you what you post on exoforma Twitter. The prediction of the model is that you score high on openness to experience. So the idea, what it says here, this person likely thrives in intellectually stimulating environments. They express curiosity about different topics from technology to ethics to personal development. That sounds fair.

3:14But, you know, I have to say I haven't been on Twitter, which is now X, in several years. which is actually an interesting point because if we believe that personality is this disposition that doesn't really change as much over time right even the traces that you generated a couple of years ago oftentimes give us this relatively accurate understanding of who someone is but let's continue next one up is conscientiousness so that's the extent to which you're organized It's dependable, reliable. What ChatGPT says, moderate to high. And then what it says here is responsible, but also allowing for flexibility.

3:54Okay. Yep. Extroversion. Extroversion is predicted to be high. So the extent to which you enjoy talking to other people. And as I went through your tweets, there's a lot of tweets that have like words, all caps, there's lols, there's emojis. So that's what it's picking up here. That could also be taken as yelling at people, though. I think it very much depends on what are the words that are capitalized. Yep, yep. Well, we'll come to agreeableness, I think, is next. Agreeableness. Also predicted to be high. Expressing warmth, empathy through expressions of gratitude. Frequently saying thank you and acknowledging contributions of colleagues.

4:36Okay. And I think the last one is... Ready for the last one? Neuroticism? Oh, God. Yeah, this one. I know. Low to moderate. Oh, really? Expresses occasional frustrations, but often balances them with humor or constructive insights. So here's the thing, though, Sandra. Like, I was a tech reporter for a long time. And when people would talk about this idea of measuring someone's, you know, data as a window into our psychology, it always kind of sounded like a horoscope to me. So some of it is essentially, to what extent is it just a horoscope and what people want to hear? The other one is, to what extent is it a public persona?

5:18And it's a legitimate concern. What's interesting in the context of these predictive models is that it's very predictable. Everybody is pretending to be more extroverted. Everybody is pretending to be a bit more neurotic. So you only get this parallel shift. And it's quite rare that someone who is extremely neurotic kind of suddenly becomes someone who was extremely emotionally stable and overtake someone who was on this lower end. And you could argue it's also part of your identity, right? If I figure out here's the person that you want to be, think of marketing again. Knowing that and knowing here's the direction that you want to take your life in, it's as helpful when it comes to influencing your behavior, perhaps, as it is knowing here's the person that you actually are.

6:04In all of these cases, you and people in your field can apply these discoveries to crafting messages that can target us all online based on what you think will resonate with us emotionally. You can play into what will make people feel what you want them to feel, whether that's to get them to buy something or potentially even vote a certain way. Yeah, so the way that I think about psychological targeting is really the ability of algorithms to use the data that we generate, anywhere from your social media posts, your credit card spending, the data that gets captured by your phone, to understand who you are as a person in terms of your psychology, your needs, personality, values, and so on.

6:53and then use these insights into your psychology to potentially change the way that you think about the world, feel about the world, and also behave in the world. By now, most of us have left behind years worth of data as we've searched, posted, and clicked our way across the internet. And despite warnings of losing our digital privacy, little has been done to legally protect us users. But is that a bad thing? What are the real dangers and benefits of psychological targeting? And how effective is it, really? On the show today, the author of Mind Masters, the data-driven science of predicting and changing human behavior.

7:39Computational social scientist Sondra Matz explains the latest on what's being collected about you, how AI is accelerating this field, and the future of trying to influence what people do. So you started your career in the early 2010s by pitching psychological targeting to companies saying, I can help you understand your clients better. I mean, we were just talking about one person, me, but you're talking about, you know, entire slices of the population that a company would want to sell to better, right? Can you tell me about that? So some of the early studies that we did was we teamed up with a beauty retailer in the UK, and their goal was to say, well, we want women to click on an ad on Facebook, go to the website, and then buy a beauty product.

8:33So they were agnostic as to which products women bought, they were just trying to drive traffic and then eventually purchases and profits. And the idea was, well, why do women buy beauty products? That probably depends on something like your personality. If you're more extroverted, maybe you're using it to stand out from the crowd, to kind of go out on a weekend night and be the center of attention on the dance floor, which is how we eventually ended up framing beauty products for when we targeted extroverted women, And as opposed to women who are much more introverted, they might use beauty products to make the most of the time that they have for themselves.

9:10Right. In this case, the ads would show like one woman in a very quiet setting. And maybe the marketing message said like beauty doesn't have to shout. So for the extroverts, I think the message said something like dance like no one's watching, but they totally are. So playing with the need of extroverts to be the center of attention, like a woman on the dance floor. and what we did is we ran these campaigns on Facebook I think over the course of a week targeting based on prior research right if you if you go to Facebook there's no way that they explicitly allow you to target personality traits so you can't say I want my ads to be sent out to people who are extroverted or introverted or neurotic or emotionally stable by the way not because Facebook doesn't know how to do it so Facebook filed a patent in 2015 on how to predict personality from their internal data.

10:03But they don't offer this option to advertisers. But because we knew that certain interests and certain language was associated empirically with being extroverted and introverted, we could create these different audiences on Facebook. And now for the beauty retailer, the idea was if we target our extroverted ads at extroverted women, tapping into their motivation, kind of really playing into their needs, they would be more likely to buy the products. And that's exactly what we found. So about a 50 % higher likelihood of women actually buying some of these products when the message matched their psychological traits.

10:44And super simple manipulation, if you think about it. It's really this one ad that they saw on Facebook once they went to the website. It looked the same for everybody, but still in the mind of the different audiences, it must have instilled something that says, yeah, no, this is actually, it's fulfilling some of the needs that I have as a person who's extroverted or introverted. This has been going on for a long time. We've been hearing about it. But the reason why we wanted to talk to you about it now, obviously you have a new book about it too, but it's because we've sort of reached a tipping point with this ability to collect this data with what we can do with it?

11:24Yeah, I think what's changed a lot, and this research has been going on for almost 10 years now, but what has really changed is the fact that anyone can make these predictions now. So when I started doing this research back in the day, what you needed was, first of all, a data set that allowed you to connect someone's psychological profiles based on questionnaire responses to the digital traces that you could get your hands on, whether that's, again, social media posts, credit card spending. And then you had to train a model that learns over time how to translate these digital traces into psychological profiles, which meant that only very few people had access to some of these predictions.

12:04Sometimes those were researchers, sometimes those were companies. I think Cambridge Analytica is the one that's top of mind for people. But now, fast forward with the introduction and really pretty rapid spread of generative AI, we now have these models that were never explicitly trained to take someone's digital footprints and turn them into predictions of psychological traits. And yet, because they've read the entire internet and they understand psychology on a really fundamental level, I can simply take your social media posts, as I did with you yesterday, and just ask ChatGPT, right, an off-the-shelf language model that anyone has access to, tell me, based on these tweets, based on what this person has written about, who do you think she is when it comes to the big five personality traits, political ideology, and whatever else you might be interested in learning about that person?

12:58When we come back, what regular people can and can't do to protect their data. More from Sandra Matz and the world of psychological targeting. Your data and you. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamarodi. Stay with us.

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15:35It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, we are covering the past, present, and future of psychological targeting. How our digital footprints are used to try and influence our behavior. We're talking to the computational social scientist, Sondra Matz. Cambridge Analytica drilled deep, looking for a trove of social media. For many of us, the first time we heard about psychological targeting was in 2018 with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. We were able to get upwards of 50 million plus Facebook records. This was a political consulting firm that used the Facebook data of tens of millions of voters to target them with bespoke political ads.

16:16That was part of their work for a major Republican donor. Steve Bannon was an executive. Just to remind people, this was the alleged targeting of people on Facebook based on their personality types with messaging that would persuade them to vote a certain way. Particularly people in swing states where that vote really, really mattered. But, you know, I remember covering that and there was never any proof that it had actually worked. Any evidence. Yeah, no evidence. So where does that stand now in terms of knowing whether this stuff worked? I mean, I guess if you're the companies you were working for, they could track somebody, click the link, they put it in their cart and paid.

16:59But but when it comes to other things, what do we know? Yeah. And I kind of argued right from the beginning is we don't know what they actually did. We have no way of tracking whether it actually worked. Even if they did something, they were probably not convincing the diehard Hillary Clinton voter to suddenly vote for Trump. Oftentimes, it's just like the people on the margins that we're pushing around. But we do have like decades of scientific evidence that kind of what we call personalized persuasion. The idea that the more you know about who's on the other side and you tap into these motivations, the more persuasive you can be in terms of trying to change their behavior.

17:36And for me, the most, so by now I think there's lots of evidence across different contexts that doing this kind of, this exercise or going through this exercise of making predictions of who's on the other side and then tapping into these motivations actually does have an impact on how people think and feel, but then also behave. And for me, the interesting kind of thought experiment in a way is this is what we do all the time in our daily interaction with other people. Like kids figure out really, really quickly that they have to ask mom for candy in a different way than they asked your dad for candy to be successful.

18:15And as adults, we don't talk to a three-year-old the same way that we talk to our boss, that we talk to our spouse. and really any conversation, code switching. And it's fundamentally human, but it's kind of trying to say, I'm adjusting both what I talk about and how I talk to the person who's on the other side, because that's what makes communication effective. That's what makes it a lot more likely that I'm going to get what I want at the end of the day. And on some level, the way that I think about this notion of psychological targeting in the context of data is like replicating some of that at scale And, of course, then that comes with a whole bunch of ethical questions because it's no longer bidirectional, right?

18:59We're not doing it to one another and we're not doing it in a very transparent way. But it's just like there's people collecting this data and trying to exercise this influence in a way that's really opaque and we don't have any control over. So in terms of the ability to actually persuade someone to change their behavior, are there new ways of measuring that accuracy? Yeah, it very much depends on the context. So if I was trying to influence someone's health behavior, for example, I would probably go with a psychological dimension that's much more closely related to what I'm trying to influence.

19:37So in the context of health, there's something that we oftentimes use, which is promotion versus prevention. Are people trying to get better and healthier and exercise more, or are they just trying to prevent their health from deteriorating and they really try to mitigate risk. So oftentimes what the psychologists actually add to the computer science-based predictions are like an understanding of here's the dimensions that might be relevant in a given context. But I think by now, really, there's a lot of evidence across different kind of contexts. I told you about the beauty retailer example, which is trying to get people to spend more.

20:16Some of the research that we've done in our lab is taking like an understanding of your psychology of your big five personality traits to help people save. And there we see pretty much exactly the same pattern. So in this case, it was actually a study done with households with very low levels of savings. So in our case, it was people with less than$100 in savings, and we try to get them to save an additional$100 over the course of four weeks. And again, we're not doing magic. We're not suddenly kind of making everybody save those $100 because that's impossible. Oftentimes, it's just like the people on the margins that we're pushing around.

20:56But even in the context of saving, what we managed to do was by tapping into people's psychology, getting, I think, 60 % more people to hit that saving goal that they set for themselves in the beginning. You demonstrated what anyone could do using ChatGPT or any AI based on publicly available data. But can you drill down a little bit more in terms of the data that marketers can buy? Because I feel like we've kind of stopped having that conversation, at least here in the U.S. It feels like, and this pains me, having done very deep reporting and trying to get people very interested in their digital privacy, but it does feel like that ship has sailed.

21:42So just can you walk us through what data can be collected, compiled, diced, and sliced if you really tried to go get it on someone? Yeah. And I think it's such an important and interesting question, because oftentimes I think what comes to people's minds when we think about data and we think about potentially violations of privacy, people gravitate towards social media. When I give talks, there's oftentimes at least one person who says, well, I'm so glad I'm off Facebook and I'm off Twitter because now you can't track me anymore. And I'm like, I wish that was true, but it's clearly not, right?

22:22Because it's just one of these data points that are so salient because the media talks about them all the time. But it kind of almost the data points that we just generate without thinking and without oftentimes being aware of are all the ones ranging from, again, your Google searches, your browsing histories, the cookies, your credit card swipes. There's almost no one now paying with cash, which is, you know, there was a reason for why the mafia is using cash because we just can't track it as easily, but nobody uses cash anymore. So whether that's your credit card or your phone. Yeah, I don't even carry a wallet anymore.

22:56Yeah, I know. And it's such an intimate data point because it means I know exactly where you are. I know you're routines. I know what you're spending your money on. Then take this a step further. Your phone is essentially a stalker 24-7 because it is someone in your pocket who knows exactly where you are at any given point in time. And even if you've turned off location tracking, right? Like to function, it has to know where you are. Exactly. It connects to a cell tower. And that also means that it's very easy for me to know, for example, where you live because that's where your phone is at night when you're home.

23:31It also makes it very easy for me to figure out who's connected to whom, because if there's two phones showing up in the same location multiple times, well, that's probably a good indication that you are connected. We also oftentimes so mindlessly sign away access to these signals on the phone to apps when we download them. And you download a weather app and that app wants to tap into your microphone and your photo gallery and your GPS records. and you're like, they clearly don't need all of this data. And yet, because we don't have the bandwidth to really go through all of these permissions and read through all of the terms and conditions, we all too often just sign away that data and then kind of take it even a step further.

24:11You could argue, well, worst case, if I don't want to be tracked, I'm just going to leave my phone at home. I'm not going to put on my Fitbit. I'm not going to put on that smartwatch. I'm not going to spend any money with my credit card. But there's cameras pretty much anywhere. So in New York, you can't go from lower Manhattan to up to Columbia campus, which is where I'm located, without being seen by a camera, unless you swim through the Hudson, which I really don't recommend. So combine that with facial recognition. And there's someone who knows what you do at any given point in time. And for me, this comparison to the offline equivalence of, again, like a stalker walking behind you.

24:51If you think about messaging, this is the mailman opening your mail, reading that mail. Or if you think about the conversations that we have about like relate a little bit more to say mental health, for example, that's a therapist just exposing the conversations that they have. All of these people in a traditional offline context would go to jail. And yet somehow because the digital equivalents are much less obvious and they're not as observable, they're not as in our faces, we don't think about them in the same way. Legislation in the U.S., I mean, it's been a complete failure. Nothing has happened, right?

25:30Is that still the case? Is Europe still way ahead of the United States? Yeah, so United States is an interesting case because it happens at the state level. If you look to California, the CCPA, which is the Consumer Protection Act, is actually very similar in the basic principles to the European Union, to the General Data Protection Regulation, which still is the most progressive type of regulation. And so you see differences across the different states in the U.S. For me, the interesting part with regulation is that, and I've changed my mind about this quite a bit over the years, is they all focus on transparency and control, which those principles sound great in theory, right?

26:16The idea that I just have to tell you what's happening with your data, and then I have to give you the control to delete it, to take it somewhere else, to kind of exercise what you want to do with that data. That's really great in theory. The problem is it feels much more of a burden and a responsibility that we're just not equipped to take on. And in a way, it lets companies and entities benefiting from our data off the hook because it says, well, we just like the consumer had the ability to manage their data. They didn't do it and use it in a certain way. And I think it's just not a fair battle.

26:51Even if you understand everything about technology, everything about data, which is already a Herculean task. So I think about this topic pretty much 24-7, and I have a hard time keeping up. But even if you did understand it, it would be a full-time job. Imagine carefully reading all of the terms and conditions, deciphering the legalese, going through your permissions. I'd much rather spend time with my friends and family than doing that. It would be a full-time job. So for me, this notion of transparency and control that these regulations are pushing is absolutely necessary. but it's nowhere near sufficient.

27:30I mean, I'm probably the only person, well, maybe not, who when that box comes up that says, except all cookies, only necessary, like I am the person who digs in and turns off all. But it annoys me. I have to do it like 20 times a day. It's such a waste of time. And who knows if it even works. I don't even know. I know. And then it's also, they don't make it easy because I'm also one of these people who tries. And then you already spent two minutes on figuring out, okay, what should I say yes to or not? Yes, exactly. And then you get to the bottom and the button that's blinking bright red is like, accept all.