Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie

If we can measure or infer certain traits in individuals using personal data, and then use those same traits to describe a culture, we can chart a distribution, creating an approximate metric for that culture. This framework made it possible for us to propose how we could use personal data found on social media, in clickstreams, or from data vendors to identify, for example, who the most extroverted Italian people are through their patterns of behavior as individual consumers and users. Then, if one wants to shift the culture to make it slightly less extroverted, this data gives us a list of actual named Italians, ordered by their degree of extroversion, whom we could track and target over time, trying to chip away at their extroversion. In other words, culture change can be thought of as nudging the distribution curve of culture up or down. What the data allowed us to do was to disaggregate that culture into individuals, who became movable units of that society.

Fox fuels anger with its hyperbolic narratives because anger disrupts the ability to seek, rationalize, and weigh information. This leads to a psychological bias called affect heuristic, where people use mental shortcuts that are significantly influenced by emotion. It’s the same bias that makes people say things they later regret in a fit of anger—in the heat of the moment they are, in fact, thinking differently.

But I began to understand that Fox works because it grafts an identity onto the minds of viewers, who then begin to interpret a debate about ideas as an attack on their identity. This in turn triggers a reactance effect, whereby alternative viewpoints actually strengthen the audience’s resolve in their original belief, because they sense a threat to their personal freedom. The more Democrats criticized Fox’s bait, the more entrenched the audience’s views and the angrier they became. This is how, for example, viewers could reject criticism of Donald Trump for saying racist things: They internalized the critique as an attack on their own identity rather than that of the candidate. This has an insidious effect in which the more debate occurs, the more entrenched the audience becomes.

If you’re a white man living in a trailer, for example, you’re probably going to get angry when you are shown people on TV who are insisting that white people are super-privileged in this country. If you grew up using an outhouse, you probably don’t have much tolerance for a big discussion about whether trans people should be able to use the toilets of their choice. If you’re lower middle class and you see a black person on welfare, it’s not surprising that your attitude would be “Well, what about my welfare?” if you live in a state that has continually cut your support. This is not to defend these views, but if we want to understand them, we have to remain open to other perspectives, even ugly ones.

Research into using social data to infer the psychological disposition of individuals was published in some of psychology’s top academic journals, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Psychological Science, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, among many others.

According to evolutionary psychologists, in order to survive in premodern times, humans developed a disproportionate attentiveness toward potential threats. The reason we instinctually pay more attention to the blood and gore of a rotting corpse on the ground than to marveling at the beautiful sky above is that the former was what helped us survive. In other words, we evolved to pay keen attention to potential threats. There’s a good reason you can’t turn away from grisly videos: You’re human.

Finding ways to blame victims is psychologically prophylactic for some people because it helps them cope with anxiety induced by uncontrollable environmental threats while maintaining a comforting view that the world will still be fair to them.

This notion of human agency serves as the philosophical basis for criminal culpability, and we punish transgressors of the law on the grounds that they made a condemnable choice. A burning building may indeed harm people, but the law does not punish that building, as it has no agency. And so human laws regulate human acts, and not the motivations or behaviors of their surroundings. The corollaries to this are the fundamental rights we have. During the Enlightenment, the fundamental rights of people were articulated as core entitlements to protect the exercise of human agency. The rights to life, liberty, association, speech, vote, and conscience are all underpinned with a presumption of agency, as they are outputs of that agency. But agency itself has not been articulated as a right per se, as it has always been presumed to exist simply by virtue of our personhood. As such, we do not have an express right to agency that is contra mundum—that is, a right to agency that is exercisable against the environment itself. We do not have a right against the heavens or the undue influence of motivated and thinking spaces to mediate the exercise of our agency. At the time of America’s founding, a situation where our agency could be manipulated by a motivated and thinking environment was never contemplated as a possibility. For the Founding Fathers, this would have been a power known only to God.