And while most of us have preferred styles of argument and validation, there are also types of arguments that really turn us off. Some people rush for a deal; others think that the deal means the merchandise is subpar. Just by eliminating the persuasion styles that rub people the wrong way, Eckles found he could increase the effectiveness of marketing materials by 30 to 40 percent.
While it’s hard to “jump categories” in products—what clothing you prefer is only slightly related to what books you enjoy—“persuasion profiling” suggests that the kinds of arguments you respond to are highly transferrable from one domain to another. A person who responds to a “get 20% off if you buy NOW” deal for a trip to Bermuda is much more likely than someone who doesn’t to respond to a similar deal for, say, a new laptop.
If Eckles is right—and research so far appears to be validating his theory—your “persuasion profile” would have a pretty significant financial value. It’s one thing to know how to pitch products to you in a specific domain; it’s another to be able to improve the hit rate anywhere you go. And once a company like Amazon has figured out your profile by offering you different kinds of deals over time and seeing which ones you responded to, there’s no reason it couldn’t then sell that information to other companies. (The field is so new that it’s not clear if there’s a correlation between persuasion styles and demographic traits, but obviously that could be a shortcut as well.)
There’s plenty of good that could emerge from persuasion profiling, Eckles believes. He points to DirectLife, a wearable coaching device by Philips that figures out which arguments get people eating more healthily and exercising more regularly. But he told me he’s troubled by some of the possibilities. Knowing what kinds of appeals specific people respond to gives you power to manipulate them on an individual basis.
With new methods of “sentiment analysis, it’s now possible to guess what mood someone is in. People use substantially more positive words when they’re feeling up; by analyzing enough of your text messages, Facebook posts, and e-mails, it’s possible to tell good days from bad ones, sober messages from drunk ones (lots of typos, for a start). At best, this can be used to provide content that’s suited to your mood: On an awful day in the near future, Pandora might know to preload
Consider the implications, for example, of knowing that particular customers compulsively buy things when stressed or when they’re feeling bad about themselves, or even when they’re a bit tipsy. If persuasion profiling makes it possible for a coaching device to shout “you can do it” to people who like positive reinforcement, in theory it could also enable politicians to make appeals based on each voter’s targeted fears and weak spots.
Infomercials aren’t shown in the middle of the night only because airtime then is cheap. In the wee hours, most people are especially suggestible. They’ll spring for the slicer-dicer that they’d never purchase in the light of day. But the three A.M. rule is a rough one—presumably, there are times in all of our daily lives when we’re especially inclined to purchase whatever’s put in front of us. The same data that provides personalized content can be used to allow marketers to find and manipulate your personal weak spots. And this isn’t a hypothetical possibility: Privacy researcher Pam Dixon discovered that a data company called PK List Management offers a list of customers titled “Free to Me—Impulse Buyers”; those listed are described as being highly susceptible to pitches framed as sweepstakes.
If personalized persuasion works for products, it can also work for ideas. There are undoubtedly times and places and styles of argument that make us more susceptible to believe what we’re told. Subliminal messaging is illegal because we recognize there are some ways of making an argument that are essentially cheating; priming people with subconsciously flashed words to sell them things isn’t a fair game. But it’s not such a stretch to imagine political campaigns targeting voters at times when they can circumvent our more reasonable impulses.
We intuitively understand the power in revealing our deep motivations and desires and how we work, which is why most of us only do that in day-to-day life with people whom we really trust. There’s a symmetry to it: You know your friends about as well as they know you. Persuasion profiling, on the other hand, can be done invisibly —you need not have any knowledge that this data is being collected from you—and therefore it’s asymmetrical. And unlike some forms of profiling that take place in plain sight (like Netflix), persuasion profiling is handicapped when it’s revealed. It’s just not the same to hear an automated coach say “You’re doing a great job! I’m telling you that because you respond well to encouragement!”
So you don’t necessarily see the persuasion profile being made. You don’t see it being used to influence your behavior. And the companies we’re turning over this data to have no legal obligation to keep it to themselves. In the wrong hands, persuasion profiling gives companies the ability to circumvent your rational decision making, tap into your psychology, and draw out your compulsions. Understand someone’s identity, and you’re better equipped to influence what he or she does.
A Deep and Narrow Path
Someday soon, Google Vice President Marissa Mayer says, the company hopes to make the search box obsolete. “The next step of search is doing this automatically,” Eric Schmidt said in 2010. “When I walk down the street, I want my smartphone to be doing searches constantly—‘did you know?’ ‘did you know?’ ‘did you know?’ ‘did you know?’” In other words, your phone should figure out what you would like to be searching for before you do.
In the fast-approaching age of search without search, identity drives media. But the personalizers haven’t fully grappled with a parallel fact: Media also shapes identity. Political scientist Shanto Iyengar calls one of primary factors accessibility bias, and in a paper titled “Experimental Demonstrations of the ‘Not-So-Minimal’ Consequences of Television News,’” in 1982, he demonstrated how powerful the bias is. Over six days, Iyengar asked groups of New Haven residents to watch episodes of a TV news program, which he had doctored to include different segments for each group.
Afterward, Iyengar asked subjects to rank how important issues like pollution, inflation, and defense were to them. The shifts from the surveys they’d filled out before the study were dramatic: “Participants exposed to a steady stream of news about defense or about pollution came to believe that defense or pollution were more consequential problems,” Iyengar wrote. Among the group that saw the clips on pollution, the issue moved from fifth out of six in priority to second.
Drew Westen, a neuropsychologist whose focus is on political persuasion, demonstrates the strength of this priming effect by asking a group of people to memorize a list of words that include
Priming isn’t the only way media shape our identities. We’re also more inclined to believe what we’ve heard before. In a 1977 study by Hasher and Goldstein, participants were asked to read sixty statements and mark whether they were true or false. All of the statements were plausible, but some of them (“French horn players get cash bonuses to stay in the Army”) were true; others (“Divorce is only found in technically advanced societies”) weren’t. Two weeks later, they returned and rated a second batch of statements in which some of the items from the first list had been repeated. By the third time, two weeks after that, the subjects were far more likely to believe the repeated statements. With information as with food, we are what we consume.
All of these are basic psychological mechanisms. But combine them with personalized media, and troubling things start to happen. Your identity shapes your media, and your media then shapes what you believe and what you care about. You click on a link, which signals an interest in something, which means you’re more likely to see articles about that topic in the future, which in turn prime the topic for you. You become trapped in a you loop, and if your identity is misrepresented, strange patterns begin to emerge, like reverb from an amplifier.
If you’re a Facebook user, you’ve probably run into this problem. You look up your old college girlfriend Sally, mildly curious to see what she is up to after all these years. Facebook interprets this as a sign that you’re interested in Sally, and all of a sudden her life is all over your news feed. You’re still mildly curious, so you click through on the new photos she’s posted of her kids and husband and pets, confirming Facebook’s hunch. From Facebook’s perspective, it looks as though you have a relationship with this person, even if you haven’t communicated in years. For months afterward, Sally’s life is far more prominent than your actual relationship
