I once met an attorney who was at the top of her field. I mean she is a cracker-jack attorney with a crazy intellect and extremely well respected in the legal field.
I asked her how she became such a great attorney. Her answer was simple, “When I was in law school, I read every footnote.”
In today’s Science Friday, we have a case where the supplemental information is as interesting, if not more interesting than the study itself.
Today’s study: “Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion” Authored by scholars from Columbia, Stanford, Wharton, and Cambridge.
It is an interesting study that explored effects when ads are matched to one of the big 5 personality traits, the OCEAN MODEL.
Study Findings
In research that will stun no one, the authors find”people’s psychological
characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.”
This is the part the drives me nuts – of course this makes sense. If you tell me what you like, I can then predict things, and I can tailor my messaging….but HOW does one do it?
The authors go on to write “that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases. Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts.“
Cool, right? That is a pretty big lift.
But the real cool stuff is in the supplemental.
How to match Likes to Personality
The supplemental demonstrates HOW they matched advertising to personality types. That’s the magic.
And it all started with one of those stupid personality tests on facebook.
So, there you have it…easy peasy….except for the organization that was conducting the personality tests stopped making the data available to researchers.
But could one reverse engineer what the researchers did? I think so….
CLICK HERE TO TAKE YOUR FREE PERSONALITY TEST (Just kidding)
