Defending against manipulation

General guidelines to bear in mind for articles like this :

1) Advertising in general has a very low success rate. Dramatic improvements are usually much easier if your base rate is extremely small.
2) The Flaw of Averages means that you're unique, just like everyone else. Targeted messages based on very crude voter profiles (like the ones described below) are never going to turn you into an automaton. People are too diverse for that.
3) It isn't necessary in an election to turn everyone into mindless drones. Never mind fooling all the people some of the time... all you need is to fool most of the people most of the time. And that's enough. In a marginal case, you don't even need that.
4) You may not need to change someone's most fundamental ideologies, which is extremely difficult, to get them to change their higher-level conclusions and actions. For that you're better off changing how statements are framed.

That said, I thought this bit was particularly interesting :

What’s interesting, Ohme says, isn’t how people respond to the questions per se, but how much they dither first. “When we measure the hesitation level, we can see that some answers are positive but with hesitation, and some are positive and instantaneous,” he says. “We measure how much you deviated [from baseline]. This deviation is key.”

Ohme insists that voters can inoculate themselves against neuroconsultants’ tactics if they’re savvy enough. “I measure hesitation. I can change your mind only if you hesitate. If you are a firm believer, I cannot change anything,” he says. “If you’re scared to be manipulated, learn. The more you learn, the more firm and stable your attitudes are, and the more difficult it is for someone to convince you otherwise.”

...The video was of a laughing baby, and I felt the corners of my mouth quirking up. After, the computer asked me how I’d felt while watching. “Happy,” I clicked. I’m a mom, right? I love babies. Yet when my emotion analysis arrived, it showed almost no trace of happiness on my face.

Thinking about the results, I realized the emotion software was right. I hadn’t really been happy at all. I had taken the test late at night, and I had been exhausted. The computer had seen me in a way I wasn’t used to seeing myself. I thought of something Dan Hill, the former advisor to the Mexican president’s campaign, had told me. “The biggest lies in life,” he’d said, “are the ones we tell ourselves.”


Originally shared by Event Horizon

Neuroconsulting. It's a thing now.

Brain, eye, and face scans that tease out people’s true desires might seem dystopian. But they’re offshoots of a long-standing political tradition: hitting voters right in the feels. For more than a decade, campaigns have been scanning databases of consumer preferences—what music people listen to, what magazines they read—and, with the help of computer algorithms, using that information to target appeals to them. If an algorithm shows that middle-aged female SUV drivers are likely to vote Republican and care about education, chances are they’ll receive campaign messages crafted explicitly to push those buttons.

Biometric technologies raise the stakes further. Practitioners say they can tap into truths that voters are often unwilling or unable to express. Neuroconsultants love to cite psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, who distinguishes between “System 1” and “System 2” thinking. System 1 “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control,” he writes; System 2 involves conscious deliberation and takes longer.

“Before, everyone was focused on System 2,” explains Rafal Ohme, a Polish psychologist who says his firm, Neurohm, has advised political campaigns in Europe and the United States. For the past decade, Ohme has devoted most of his efforts to probing consumers’ and voters’ System 1 leanings, which he thinks is as important as listening to what they say. It’s been great for his business, he says, because his clients are impressed enough with the results to keep coming back for more.

Many neuroconsulting pioneers built their strategy around so-called “neuro-­focus groups.” In these studies, involving anywhere from a dozen to a hundred people, technicians fit people’s scalps with EEG electrodes and then show them video footage of a candidate or campaign ad. As subjects watch, scalp sensors pick up electrical impulses that reveal, second by second, which areas of the brain are activated.

EEG scans, in fact, are now just one in a smorgasbord of biometric techniques. Romano Micha also uses near-infrared eye trackers and electrodes around the orbital bone to track “saccades,” minuscule movements of the eye that indicate viewers’ attentional focus as they watch a campaign spot. Other electrodes supply a rough gauge of arousal by measuring electrical activity on the surface of a person’s skin.

Of course, you can’t stick electrodes on every person watching TV and browsing Facebook. But you don’t need to. The results from experiments on small neuro-focus groups can be used to influence voters who aren’t being sampled themselves. If, for example, biodata reveals that liberal women over 50 are fearful when they see an ad about illegal immigration, campaigns that want to stoke such fear can broadcast that same message to millions of people with similar demographic and social profiles.

The fine-tuning of neuro-statistical methods should generate interesting reflexive forces within political and cultural systems. Politically-significant statistical results will perhaps inevitably generate the cultivation and exploitation of messages, narratives and publicity campaigns which will then go on to generate positive feedback loops of behavioural reinforcement within the target groups. These become self-propagating social and cultural patterns. Fascinating questions of sociological and communications-systems feedback to arise at this point. It is all very Blade Runner Voight-Kampff-test-esque in an indirect way.

"While walking along in desert sand, you suddenly look down and see a tortoise crawling toward you. You reach down and flip it over onto its back. The tortoise lies there, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it cannot do so without your help. You are not helping. Why?"
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611808/the-neuropolitics-consultants-who-hack-voters-brains/