The Neuroscience of Picking a Presidential Candidate (Sue Halpern, The New Yorker)

[swag]

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-neuroscience-of-picking-a-presidential-candidate

Excerpt:

"spark Neuro’s study of swing-state voters was held two weeks before the 2016 Presidential election. “We would scan people’s brains as they were watching different kinds of media and watch their emotion and attention responses as interpreted by our algorithms being read straight from their brain,” Gerrol said. Not only did spark’s research find that a number of people who self-identified as undecided were actually connecting with Donald Trump on an emotional level; it also indicated that many others who claimed to be undecided were just too embarrassed or uncomfortable making their pro-Trump feelings known. “Some of these undecided voters would see that they had a strong emotional reaction to, let’s say, Trump talking about building the wall,” Gerrol said, “and they would suddenly become much more introspective.” If spark Neuro’s algorithm was accurate—which Gerrol doubted at the time—then Clinton’s chances to win were far less likely than had been widely predicted.

In January, 2017, two months after Clinton’s loss—which was a win, of sorts, for spark Neuro’s math—Gerrol launched the company, with the backing of a number of deep-pocket investors, including Peter Thiel, Michael Eisner, and Will Smith. Gerrol’s clients, for the most part, are major consumer brands. spark Neuro, for example, tested Nike’s controversial Colin Kaepernick ad, with its “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything” tag, and found that it played well with the buying public. (The advertisement won an Emmy Award.) The company also works with film companies, testing movie trailers to understand where they elicit strong emotion and where attention flags, since trailers can make or break box-office sales.) “To be a blockbuster hit, what we’re looking for is actually commonalities across groups where there’s what we call high degree of neural synchrony,” Gerrol told me. “In other words, my brain waves and your brain waves are in synch.”

So far, spark Neuro has never worked for a particular candidate, though Gerrol told me that he’s interested in the “potential application of our work in the political domain.” Last June, spark Neuro put together a small group of likely Democratic voters to watch an abridged video reel of the primary season’s first round of debates. The number of Presidential contenders had swelled to twenty, and Gerrol and his team were curious if spark Neuro’s approach could tell them something that the polls—which at the time had Joe Biden at the top—were missing. They were unsurprised that a majority of participants, when asked who they were likely to vote for, said Biden. But the data showed something else: Elizabeth Warren, who at the time was a distant second or third, had engaged participants more than the other candidates, and Pete Buttigieg, who respondents ranked as their sixth choice, was right behind her. Three months later, Warren briefly eclipsed Biden in a number of national polls, and, two months after that, Buttigieg emerged as a top-tier candidate.

Traditional political polls, which are a small part of the three-billion-dollar public-opinion-research industry, are often widely divergent and, as we saw in 2016, unreliable. One reason for this, according to Gerrol, is that people tend to say what they think others want to hear—Gerrol called this the “social desirability bias, the innate desire to be liked”—or they are susceptible to “groupthink,” or they say nothing because they don’t want to be judged for their beliefs. “This is especially problematic in politics,” he said, “hence all the errors in polling and all of the mistakes in campaign decisions.” Subconscious feelings—what spark Neuro is after—are considered more reliable, because they can’t be easily gamed or swayed by outside forces. “We’re not really conscious of our emotions in real time,” Gerrol said. “Our algorithm is not reading minds. It’s understanding if you are paying more attention or less attention, and if you’re having stronger or weaker emotions, and to some degree what the nature of those emotions are.”

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[JonLP24]

1. Trump was the Fox News candidate

If your whole world was watching Fox, reading Brietbart, etc you'd think Trump is the only one making any sense.

[marble falls]

2. Jeebers and now its 'nuero-science' and all that now is it?