As a species, humans are not particularly rational; we are controlled by a plethora of external and internal factors such as our environment (whether it is hot, cold, dry or humid ...), our hormones, our emotions, threat condition and more.
Of course we all know this and we take steps to put ourselves in environments and situations which allow us some element of control over these factors — albeit not complete control.
However, there are many other influencers which impact the way we think, the things we do, the things we say, the places we go, the people we associate with etc.
Some of these influencers we have little to no control over. For example, we have little control over the curriculum which governs what we will learn in our schools — even as a child grows to a young adult and enrols at university, they may well have a choice over the generic subjects they wish to study but have much less control over the content of those specific programmes. It is only really when we get to the point of a Master or Doctoral thesis that we gain any significant control over what we are studying and even then it is usually heavily influenced by our sponsors and supervisors.
As such, self determination (the ability to control our lives) is already limited by the rules and constructs of the societies in which we live.
To quote Marx:
In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
We are aware of these risks and we introduce laws and constitutions to create inalienable rights such as the right to free speech and expression; the right to private lives; the right to free movement and association. So we have the right to be a free and independent people but these rights are under a barrage of unending suppression; and the attack is not just from governments who desire to control us, but also from private corporations who wish to do the same.
Manipulation Historically, many different techniques have been deployed to manipulate citizens and we see an increase in their use during specific times and events. For example, during war, there is a increase in the use of nationalist propaganda; during election campaigns we see the frequent use of sound bites designed to elicit an emotional reaction either in favour of a political party or against the opposing political party.
Again, if we look to the education of our children, our history books are inked with subjectivity to create some form of faith in the governance of the state — we won the war because we are righteous but the enemy were ruthless barbarians.
The hegemony of the press and media (both domestic and global) has an incredible influence on our perspectives and understanding of the world in which we live.
But modern society through the emergence of technology has created a far more significant threat to the self than any time before. In the present we find ourselves at more risk of losing self determination than at any point in history — such is the vast array of influencers targeting each and every one of us every microsecond that we are awake (and perhaps soon even whilst we sleep). We are becoming organic terminals responding to the commands of corporations who seek to profit from their ability to manipulate us and they are doing this increasingly through the exploitation of our pyschology.
Advertising Advertising has existed for centuries — the ability to promote one’s wares or services to potential customers is as old as society itself; but in the last twenty years the use of advertising has become so ubiquitous that it is both impossible to avoid and becoming increasingly difficult to identify.
Native Advertising in traditional press and media has become so enchained that is is almost impossible to understand where the real news ends and the advertising begins; and these techniques are not just deployed by less recognised publications but by the pillars of the World’s media.
In a recent court case in Germany, a lawyer representing Axel Springer in a lawsuit they filed against a German company called Eyeo (the company behind the popular AdBlock Plus software) stated that they were not in the business of selling news, they were in the business of selling advertising. Axel Springer are one of the largest publishers of news in Germany. So it seems that even the traditional press no longer consider themselves to be messengers of news but instead to be platforms from which to sell advertising.
Advertising has also changed through the development of technology and the rise of the Internet. It is no longer a dumb message on a billboard or in a magazine; they are now intelligent. Technology has evolved to the point that we don’t just know if someone has interacted with an advertisement — we know if they have even looked at and if so for how long, when and from where (and by where, I don’t just mean which web site or app it was viewed in but your physical location and potentially even whom you were with).
Giant corporations such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many more you have probably never even heard of, are deploying technologies which monitor us in real time everywhere we go online (and increasingly offline) in order to build profiles about us so they can target more relevant advertisements at us.
They claim that by knowing more about the things we like, the places we go, the people we associate with, the things we watch etc. that they can improve our experience by only showing us advertising that is relevant to us. What they don’t tell us is that they all employ an array of experts in psychology who are able to interpret all this information collected about us and then use that knowledge to manipulate us for their benefit, not ours.
Advertising has always been about manipulation — about pursuading an individual that they really need or will benefit from buying a specific product or service. But the manipulation has always been mitigated by the limitation of knowledge about the individuals who would see or hear those advertisements.
Traditionally an advertisement on a billboard does not know who will see it, what their interests are, what their income might be (although with the emergence of smart billboards this is becoming increasingly possible). So the amount of influence or manipulation that type of advertisement can have is limited.
Advertising in magazines and other publications is a little less guess work because of the context in which those advertisements are placed — for example an advertisement for a new fishing rod in a fishing magazine can reasonably be expected to appeal to the readers because they would not be reading the publication if there were not interested in fishing. But the intelligence is limited to a single context.
Contextual advertising gives assurance to brands that there will at least be some interest from the target audience and therefore their return on investment is likely to be higher.
Programmatic Advertising But modern programmatic advertising goes significantly beyond the intelligence of contextual advertising; and again this is due to the ubiquitous nature of the technologies which are responsible for developing these profiles.
Tracking technologies such as cookies, location sharing, device identifiers, inaudible sound beacons, invisible pixels etc. deployed by adtech corporations across billions of web pages, millions of apps and billions of devices, give them insights and intelligence we do not even know about ourselves.
This information is stored indefinitely, expanded on exponentially and sold interminably without the knowledge or control of those to whom it relates.
Furthermore, the manipulation factor of the advertisements created from these profiles is exponentially higher than those risks associated with more traditional (contextual) advertising.
By knowing so much about each and every individual at whom the advertising is targeted, the psychological impacts of the advertising are significantly more profound than one might think.
Subliminal Advertising In 1957 Social Psychologist, James Vicary, ran an experiment in a movie theatre in New Jersey, USA where he flashed up the messages ‘Hungry? Eat Popcorn’ and ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ for 0.03s multiple times throughout the movie. He claimed that the experiment led to a significant increase in the sale of popcorn and Coca-Cola.
These messages appeared and disappeared so quickly that the conscious brain did not notice them but subconsciously the messages were processed, a phenomenon known as subliminal perception.
As a result of the publicity surrounding the experiment coinciding the an increase in the availability and use of televisions, the technique was rapidly adopted by television stations selling advertising. The issue became so significant that in 1974 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the USA issued a statement:
subliminal advertising is contrary to the public interest and intended to be deceptive, and that any station employing them risks losing its liscence.
Bans quickly followed in Canada, UK, Europe and Australia, where it was deemed that manipulating the subconcious processing of the human brain in an attempt to sell a product or service was unethical and was a risk to self determination and choice.
Psychographic Profiling Whereas subliminal perception raised concerns in the 1970s it pales in comparison to psychographic profiling.
Many of you will be aware of the term psychographic profiling as it was thrown into the spotlight earlier this year due to the the controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica.
Psychographic profiling is a technique which is used to gain insight into things such as our personality, our values, our attitudes and our behaviour. Psychographics has its foundations in behavioural psychology and again is not a modern concept — it was studied in the early 20th century by academics such as Thorsten Veblen and Max Weber. Psychographics were widely adopted during Word War II to generate effective propaganda and has been a technique used for marketing purposes long before it was deployed by Cambridge Analytica to influence voters in election campaigns.
The power of psychographics exists explicitly in its efficiency to manipulate — it enables one to make accurate inferences as to the personality types of individuals and once you have that it is much easier to manipulate them because one becomes aware of different types of emotional triggers; but more importantly it accurately predicts which individuals are more or less likely to respond to specific emotional triggers.
In the case of Cambridge Analytica as an example, this technique was used to target messages about immigration to individuals who met the profile of being angry about immigration issues and therefore more likely to be manipulated by a message taking a strong anti-immigration approach. These messages were deployed to channels where these people were likely to see them and targeted directly at them (social media).
Just as subliminal advertising removes the ability for rational choices (the messages are processed subconsciously), psychographics targets emotion to illicit a non-rational response. When we react to things from an emotional perspective it is not a genuinely conscious reaction, it is not based on logical reason. This makes it a particularly effective technique for manipulation because by targeting our emotions we behave in a way which is outside our normal decision making process and forces us to make decisions we might not ordinarily make had we processed the message rationally.
So when it comes to advertising — if advertisements are based on psychographics it is hard to argue that the decision to purchase something is a free choice — in effect we are being controlled and manipulated through the exploitation of our psychology which is why I used the term Digital Psychology in the title of this article.
We see it as a significant risk to democracy when this technique is used to manipulate voters through election marketing campaigns; but as of yet there has been little (if any) focus on the risk this technique poses elsewhere (and for the purpose of this article, self determination) — despite the fact that psychographics have been widely adopted in digital advertising for the last 15+ years and in marketing for over half a century.
Our rights as afforded to us under various laws and constitutions are vulnerable to these techniques because if we are being manipulated through the use of psychographics then those very rights to freedom of expression, association, movement, speech, choice, thought etc. are rendered useless if we are no longer able to make rational choices — if our access to self determination is blocked by a barrage of manipulation.
Hawthorne effect Furthermore, it has long been established (again through the study behavioural psychology) that people change their behaviour when they become aware that they are being observed. This is known as the Hawthorne Effect.
So with psychographic profiling being ubiquitous in our online (and increasingly offline) lives; with an increasing awareness that everything we do is being observed — how do we prevent the erosion of natural behaviour.
At what point can we be assured that our responses and choices are still our own and not those of some faceless corporation seeking to profit from us, or some government (domestic or foreign) propaganda campaign?
If we know we are being constantly observed (that ‘privacy is dead’) then what happens to self determination, how do we control our own lives?
The Importance of Privacy Without privacy, without the ability to not be observed — whether that be through government surveillance or the surveillance capital which is created through the use of psychographics; we can no longer assume to be a free people, we lose access to self determination.
Privacy is not about conspiracies or blocking annoying spam emails; privacy is not about keeping secrets or wanting to hide our vices; privacy is not some privileged commodity which should only be available to those who can afford to keep it… Privacy is fundamental to everything we are and everything we do both as individuals and as a society.
Without privacy we lose free choice, we lose self determination — the consequence of that is we lose freedom of thought, speech, association, movement and all of these other freedoms we have fought so hard to develop and maintain.
Without privacy we lose autonomy and we lose democracy.
Conclusions Many people associate privacy with inconvenience; these laws which we are creating make it more difficult to conduct business, make it more difficult to use services etc. and this is a mindset which needs to change.
We should not lose focus on the consequences of psychographics — the risks are too high, the losses too grave.
We need to embrace privacy and enter an age of data ethics where we are not being constantly observed, where our choices can once again be our own and where our species can continue to grow and thrive.
That does not mean we cannot innovate, we cannot automate and we cannot become more efficient — it just means we need to do these things differently by embracing techniques such as privacy by design and data minimisation.
We are not at risk of losing our freedom, it has already been taken from us — we are now fighting the most important war in the history of the world — the war to win back the self.
