When I read about Dr. Michal Kosinski in the story from das Magazin a few weeks ago, I was quite upset.
Human biology did not significantly change in the last 10.000 years; the same way we cannot choose what nutrition and vitamins our body needs to stay healthy, we cannot choose what our brain responds to.
Everybody is born to be easily manipulated. Without exception.
Scientists have discovered many ways how our brain perceives “reality” and how we make decisions. Nobel price winner Daniel Kahneman spend his whole life to study how humans make decisions. He discovered mechanisms of our human brain that directly influence how we perceive reality. Just to name a few:
Availability bias. e.g. We perceive information as more trustworthy, the more often it is shown to us. The “ease of information retrieval” from memory is used to judge the frequency of events, not the actual number of events. That is why terror attacks seem so much more common than they actually are.
Anchoring. e.g. We tend too heavily on the first piece of information about any new topic. This is heavily used in setting expectations for price discussions; but also prominent in mud slinging tactics. If we start with picturing the opponent as the worst, it is easier to sell them as “at least bad”.
Confirmation bias. e.g. We are way more likely to retain information that confirms what we already believe, while discarding what does not fit our preconceived worldview. Couple that with negative anchoring, and a set of fake stories, and your political opponent is suddenly a godless, sex-ring organizing murderous corporate sellout bitch.
Loss aversion. e.g. We feel loses hurt way more than equaly/more valuable gains. Make people feel that they are about to lose something, and they will get their asses up to safe it. It is way harder to get people to show the same enthusiasm for gaining something, even if the gain would be more valuable than what they would have lost for it.
This is why weaponized social media propaganda coupled with psychological analysis is so dangerous; people are most of the time and without exception highly irrational in their decision making.
Find out what makes us emotional, and our analytical thinking skills shut off, we are prey to impulse and eat up all information uncritically. Once this information is internalized, we defend it with teeth and claw, without ever again checking its truth content. Welcome to alternative reality.
You do not have to be a genius to press the buttons anybody of us has; you just have to reach us and make us emotional (angry, fearful, anxious, outraged). Social media is exactly the right tool to do that.
And the bad news come at last:
We cannot use positive messaging as effectively as negative messaging; because positive messages are emotionally weaker than negative, outrageous ones. Negative messages on social media will always win out as being the vehicle of choice to form (and inform) our perception of reality.
Cambridge analytica knows that, that is why there are so much more effective in pure negative campains like Trump and Brexit; where they did not win because of having better ideas (to solve probems of governance), but by marking everybody else as the enemy to be destroyed.
I wish I knew how to counter that; one analogy I have to offer is how to overcome loss aversion.
When at least twice as much is there to gain, people start to overcome their aversion to loss. So maybe if good, rational people try at least twice at hard to bring people to reality than the negative actors who try to stir people away from it, we might be able to win them over long enough to equip them with the tools necessary to not fall prey so easily the next time.
