Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Sue Halpern at The New Yorker writes—The Neuroscience of Picking a Presidential Candidate: How new technology is allowing campaigns to tap into the subconscious thoughts and feelings of potential voters:
During the 2016 Presidential primary, spark Neuro, a company that uses brain waves and other physiological signals to delve into the subliminal mind, decided to assess people’s reactions to the Democratic candidates. The company had not yet launched, but its C.E.O., Spencer Gerrol, was eager to refine its technology. In a test designed to uncover how people are actually feeling, as opposed to how they say they are feeling, spark Neuro observed, among other things, that the cadence of Bernie Sanders’s voice grabbed people’s attention, while Hillary Clinton’s measured tones were a bore. A few months later, Katz Media Group, a radio-and-television-ad representative firm, hired Gerrol’s group to study a cohort of undecided voters in Florida and Pennsylvania. The company’s chief marketing officer, Stacey Schulman, picked spark Neuro because its algorithm took into account an array of neurological and physiological signals. “Subconscious emotion underlies conscious decision-making, which is interesting for the marketing world but critically important in the political realm,” Schulman told me. “This measures how the body is responding, and it happens before you articulate it.”
Neuromarketing—gauging consumers’ feelings and beliefs by observing and measuring spontaneous, unmediated physiological responses to an ad or a sales pitch—is not new. “For a while, using neuroscience to do marketing was something of a fad, but it has been applied to commerce for a good ten years now,” Schulman said. Nielsen, the storied media-insight company, has a neuromarketing division. Google has been promoting what it calls “emotion analytics” to advertisers. A company called Realeyes claims to have trained artificial intelligence to “read emotions” through Webcams; another called Affectiva says that it “provides deep insight into unfiltered and unbiased consumer emotional response to brand content” through what it calls “facial coding.” Similarly, ZimGo Polling, a South Korean company that operates in the United States, has paired facial-recognition technology with “automated emotion understanding” and natural language processing to give “insights into how people feel about real-time issues,” and “thereby enables a virtual 24/7 town hall meeting with citizens.” This is crucial, according to the C.E.O. of ZimGo’s parent company, because “people vote on emotion.”
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.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Fiorina's fail train at top speed:
The hits keep on coming for Carly Fiorina, the failed CEO gasping for air in the GOP primary to take on Senator Boxer. Carly's campaign has been one unmitigated boatload of fail since its inception. Let's summarize:
- The company she nearly ruined has now maxed out to Senator Boxer.
- She trails primary opponent Tom Campbell badly in all the latest polling.
- She has lied—twice—about her fundraising numbers.
- And to top it off, her website rollout is often considered a nominee for all-time worst.
The California Democratic Party has definitely taken notice, and today announced the creation of a parody site dedicated to exposing Carly's floundering campaign: carlyfailorina.com (it's pleasing that we blogger types aren't the only ones using the alliterative "fail" to describe Carly's drain-circling campaign).