7:00 – 4:30 ASRC MKT

• How A Russian Troll Fooled America Reconstructing the life of a covert Kremlin influence account (Herding behavior???)
• Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion
  • People are exposed to persuasive communication across many different contexts: Governments, companies, and political parties use persuasive appeals to encourage people to eat healthier, purchase a particular product, or vote for a specific candidate. Laboratory studies show that such persuasive appeals are more effective in influencing behavior when they are tailored to individuals’ unique psychological characteristics. However, the investigation of large-scale psychological persuasion in the real world has been hindered by the questionnaire-based nature of psychological assessment. Recent research, however, shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets. Capitalizing on this form of psychological assessment from digital footprints, we test the effects of psychological persuasion on people’s actual behavior in an ecologically valid setting. In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically tailored advertising, we find 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. Our findings suggest that the application of psychological targeting makes it possible to influence the behavior of large groups of people by tailoring persuasive appeals to the psychological needs of the target audiences. We discuss both the potential benefits of this method for helping individuals make better decisions and the potential pitfalls related to manipulation and privacy
• Wrote up notes from yesterday
• COLLECTIVE DEBATE (MIT) is a tool that tries to engage users in constructive debate. The questions were devised by Jonathan Haidt and his team for YourMorals.org – a site that collects data on moral sense.
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  • After using it some, it seems awkward, and requires a good deal of busywork. Much delayed gratification, and you seem to only select the arguments that work best for you. The visualizations, based on the 5 axis are pretty cool, could be some default axis to play with.
• Continuing with From Keyword Search to Exploration – finished. Need to get my notes over from the Kindle, which is not posting them….
  • The mapping work situates in the much broader Socio-Organizational and Cultural context (pp 16). The taxonomies show that virtually no work has been done in this area, capping out at Work-task-related search
  • The final task was exploratory, where users were asked to learn and produced a summarized report about a certain topic. This third type of task is a good example of something that has not been included in Information Retrieval research, which, as mentioned above, has focused on matching documents to queries. Instead, by asking users to carry out learning tasks, we can assess the system for other types of information-seeking activities, such as comparison, synthesis, and summarization. (pp 69)
  • A Knowledge Task-Based Framework for Design and Evaluation of Information Visualizations
  • WaveLens: A New View onto Internet Search Results
  • Considerations for information environments and the NaviQue workspace
• Banging away at Angular. Basically figuring out what I did yesterday. Ok, done. I think it makes more sense now.