Sandra Matz

Yeah, so I think part of it might be bias, right? One of the things that we're limited by as humans is we have only a sliver of experience and we have our own perspective on the world. And that's influencing every judgment that we make about other people. Now, we also have a lot less data to work with, right?

If you look at the prediction of models that we build, they are looking at millions and millions and millions of data points. all integrating them at the same time, there's just no way that we have access to millions of millions of friendships that allow us to then judge someone's personality based on their behavior.

Yeah. Let's imagine it's like Sherlock Holmes with a million Watsons. Yeah.

Yeah. So Google searches, if you think about that, Google is probably the closest confidant that we have, right? We ask Google questions that we don't even dare to ask our closest friends, our partners. So on some level, it's not surprising that whatever we search for on Google actually reveals a lot of what's going on inside. And that could

be anything from mental health to truth about society that we might not want to see. So one of a close friend, Seth Stevens Davidovich, and what he did is he looked at search data. So all of the searches that people make, and he was trying to uncover some of the relationships between what we search for and really kind of truths about society. So that could be anything from

What do people search for when they search for sex? Do people look for abortions more often than we actually see in the official data? Do people search for racist jokes more often than people would admit in public? So I think Google is really the source that captures what's going on inside our mind and stuff that we don't want to share with anyone else.

Yeah, that's right. And I think, again, if you look at the official polls, nobody wants to admit that. So those are correlations that you don't necessarily see showing up in survey data, but you do see them show up in these more hidden cues.

Yeah, so this was a study that we did where we looked at what's driving populist voting. And what we were particularly interested in is affect. So to what extent is this negative affect, and not just like the more aggressive negative affect like anger, which you oftentimes see talked about in the media, but also the more subtle ones like sadness and depression.

To what extent are those emotions as they show up on social media linked to people voting for populist candidates? So one of the elections that we looked into was Brexit in the UK. So people voting to leave the European Union or the 2016 US presidential election.

And what you find consistently is that in areas where there's a lot of this negative affect showing up on social media, people are also more likely to vote for these populist candidates and causes.

Yeah. And you have all of these predictive models, right? So you have all of these predictive models trying to project what is the outcome of an election. None of them really consider tone or emotional valence based on social media.

Yeah, so sometimes I think it's like the behaviors that you show, right? Shopping and Whole Foods is probably a proxy for some of the more psychological variables. That could be anything from openness, which we know is associated with being liberal, could be associated with socioeconomic status.

And the same way that negative emotions, for example, is associated oftentimes with a desire for change. And in that sense, it's not necessarily surprising that those people who feel currently bad about themselves are Want to vote for a candidate that promises change?

So the idea here was that if we could make saving more appealing to people to make it more personally relevant, could we help them put that money, the extra money to the side? So we teamed up with Save a Life, which is a fintech company in the US. They are trying to help low income families save for a rainy day.

So the people that we work with were people with very low levels of savings, so less than $100. And our goal was to get them to add an additional $100 to their savings account over the course of four weeks. So we teamed up with the creative team of Save a Life and we essentially asked them, well, come up with with saving messages that try to encourage, say, people who are very agreeable.

So people who care about other people who care about their social relationships and maybe tell them that if you manage to put some money to the side right now, this is a great way of making sure that your loved ones are protected.

Now, if you're talking to someone who is much more competitive and critical, which is the other side of the same personality trait, maybe you want to highlight how just putting this money to the side gets them ahead of the game. So we kind of came up with this different type of messaging for all of the big five personality traits.

And then we just sent out the messages over the course of four weeks. And we looked at how many people eventually managed to save an additional $100. What did you find? So what we find is that essentially if we target people with the messages that were tailored to their personality, about 11% of the entire sample managed to put $100 to the site.

Now that's certainly far from perfect, but ideally we'd want this to be closer to 100%. But if you think about it, it means that someone is doubling their savings over the course of four weeks. And what's more important is that it was also much better than the existing messaging that Save a Life had been using up to this point.

So they had been trying to perfect their messaging over a couple of years, and we were still 60% better than the gold standard that they were using at the time.