Pollsters often assume respondents can remember basic political behavior. It’s not a wise assumption. Professionals are often asking people whether they voted last year, who they voted for, whether they got a piece of mail or saw a particular ad. We’ve got lots of good evidence that many people have […] Read more »
Long Before Cambridge Analytica, a Belief in the ‘Power of the Subliminal’
Nearly three decades ago, an ambitious young London advertising executive named Nigel Oakes fell out with his partners, two psychologists, over a central claim of his new business: That using the tools of social science, he could plant motivations in a person’s brain without their knowledge, prompting them to behave […] Read more »
How Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked — according to the person who built it
How accurately can you be profiled online? Andrew Krasovitckii/Shutterstock.com Matthew Hindman, George Washington University The researcher whose work is at the center of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data analysis and political advertising uproar has revealed that his method worked much like the one Netflix uses to recommend movies. In an email […] Read more »
The Mind Of The Village: Understanding Our Implicit Biases
Are you racist? It’s a question that makes most of us uncomfortable and defensive. … This week on Hidden Brain, we examine research about prejudices so deeply buried, we often doubt their existence. We’ll begin with a focus on police shootings of unarmed black men. Later in the show, we look […] Read more »
Why Dozens Of Mass Shootings Didn’t Change Americans’ Minds On Guns
The mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, isn’t fading quietly from the headlines like so many acts of gun violence before it. Nearly two weeks after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, media attention is still focused on the survivors and parents of victims who are demanding […] Read more »
Study: Conservatives amplified Russian trolls 30 times more often than liberals in 2016
Conservatives were much more likely than liberals to retweet Russian trolls in the 2016 election, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Southern California released this month. It traced Russian efforts to influence America’s 2016 presidential campaign via Twitter using 45 million election-related tweets generated by […] Read more »