Kelly connects with Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz to discuss her new book “Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior.” 

You open your book talking about the tiny village in Germany that you grew up in, where everyone knows everyone else’s business. What is that tiny village now? 

“It’s now social media. It’s like where psychologists would call behavioral identity claims, actually. It’s like all of the explicit signals that you send about how you want to see yourself, how you want others to see you, all the way to what we think of as behavioral residue, these unintentional traces that we generate as we interact with technology, ranging from your GPS records that get captured by your smartphone, your browsing histories, or really the traces that you don’t think about twice. But still, they offer this really intimate window into your psychology, into your habits, your preferences, your routines, your desires. And the same way that my neighbors could use that information to influence my choices in a way, algorithms can do the same today.” 

You write about psychological targeting, which sounds bad – but it’s not necessarily always bad, right? 

“Psychological targeting, the way that I think about it at the most basic level, is really the ability of algorithms to both read from our minds: take our data, understand our preferences, our desires, our motivations. And then, in the second step, move right into our minds. So that’s when I think about influencing behavior, influencing choice, influencing the way that we feel about the world, the way that we think about a certain problem. So, there’s these two stages of insight and then influence. And you’re absolutely right in that any technology can be used in both ways. There’s a saying that I really like from a tech historian, Melvin Kranzberg, who said that technology is neither good nor bad, but it’s also not neutral.” 

So how would a positive use of this algorithm work? 

“So it’s very easy to see how this can easily be manipulated, but there’s also all of these very powerful ways in which you could say, well, there’s so many things that we struggle with as humans when it comes to accomplishing the goals that we set for ourselves. It’s anywhere from exercising more, eating more healthily, improving our mental health. And those are things that are difficult for us to do without any support. So, the more I understand about your motivation and desire and needs, the better I can actually help you accomplish these goals.”