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Posts Tagged ‘Psychology’

Mining the new Gold

March 9th, 2011
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The Wall Street Journal has been running a fantastic set of articles called What They Know. Today’s (15th in their series) is called TV’s Next Wave: Tuning In to You. This article states that:

Data-gathering firms and technology companies are aggressively matching people’s TV-viewing behavior with other personal data—in some cases, prescription-drug records obtained from insurers—and using it to help advertisers buy ads targeted to shows watched by certain kinds of people.

How this translates, the article explains, is that these companies are now tracking you at a level of surfing and life-involvement that is highly customizable to your tv. (They don’t have to know your name, they know who you are by your habits.) Let’s say, for example, that you watched five cookie commercials (tracked), then later in the week you bought a package of cookies (tracked from purchases). These companies will start to get a picture of how many cookie commercials (or anything else that you watch) it will take to affect your behavior. Using an example from the article, the U.S. Army tested four different ads for recruitment:

One group, dubbed “family influencers” by Cablevision, saw an ad featuring a daughter discussing with her parents her decision to enlist. Another group, “youth ethnic I,” saw an ad featuring African-American men testing and repairing machinery. A third, “youth ethnic II,” saw soldiers of various ethnicities doing team activities.

Someone will likely claim that there’s no personally identifiable information being exchanged. That will be a lie, as they could only make that claim by defining “personally identifiable information” in a very different way than regular people–or government regulators–would. This is more about tracking and compiling the most intimate details of our lives, so we can be manipulated into acting a certain way.

Coaching moment: Corporate behavior like this is an example of a slippery slope. There is no real end to the social destruction that could be wrought on our world by corporate visions of a “good society.” I doubt that any one person that works for these companies would wish to be tracked and manipulated in this way. But when that person goes to work for a company that does this, the person is “just doing his job.”

There’s a clear reason why “Do Not Track” legislation is being proposed. This story points out an example of tracking that, I would argue, crosses ethical boundaries. It’s one thing to use voluntarily shared data about people. It’s another to invade their homes and lives for corporate gain.

I might be over-reacting. How do you feel about this?

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Things we don’t know

October 19th, 2009
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picture of puzzled faceIt’s hardly news to admit that I don’t know everything, and I bet you don’t either. It’s probably not news to say that psychologists don’t know everything either. So it is with some amusement that I ran across this collection of 150 word posts by a group of world-leading psychologists about things they don’t know. The group of posts are part of a celebration of 150 issues of the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest. (Congratulations BPS!)

Here’s a sample post. This one is by Paul Rozin on Time management.

I generally believe that we learn from experience. However, a recent study I did with Karlene Hanko repeats a finding from Kahneman and Snell, that people are very poor at predicting how their liking will change for a new product (in our case, two new foods and two new body products) after using it for a week. We predicted that the parents of our college undergraduates would be better than their children at predicting their hedonic trajectory, but 25 more years of self experience did nothing for them. Nor for me. Every night, I bring home a pile of work to do in the evening and early morning. I have been doing this for over 50 years. I always think I will actually get through all or most of it, and I almost never get even half done. But I keep expecting to accomplish it all. What a fool I am.

Coaching moment: Take a few minutes to think about stuff that you know, and stuff that you don’t. What’s something you don’t know? What does that mean to you? (Whatever it means, it’s part of who you are.)

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