The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

What Facebook researchers failed to acknowledge in either experiment is that a person’s susceptibility to subliminal cues and his or her vulnerability to a “contagion” effect is largely dependent upon empathy: the ability to understand and share in the mental and emotional state of another person, including feeling another’s feelings and being able to take another’s point of view—sometimes characterized as “affective” or “cognitive” empathy. Psychologists have found that the more a person can project himself or herself into the feelings of another and take the other’s perspective, the more likely he or she is to be influenced by subliminal cues, including hypnosis. Empathy orients people toward other people. It allows one to get absorbed in emotional experience and to resonate with others’ experiences, including unconsciously mimicking another’s facial expressions or body language. Contagious laughing and even contagious yawning are examples of such resonance.