Mindfuck
Page 9
It turned out that what Mercer had in mind went beyond the economy, but at the time our focus was on demonstrating what SCL was capable of doing. After some deliberation, Bannon decided that we should run a proof of concept in Virginia, which felt like a good microcosm of America. It’s a little bit northern and a little bit southern. It has mountains and coastal areas, military towns, wealthy D.C. suburbs, rural areas and farms, and a cross section of rich and poor, black and white. The Virginia experiment would mark the first time we’d played with data in the United States. As I’d done with the LPC and the Lib Dems, we started off with qualitative research—unstructured, open-ended conversations with local people. Nobody on the SCL team was American, and we didn’t know anything about Virginia, which was as foreign to me as Ghana. The obvious first step was to visit the state and talk to people, to learn how they perceived the world and what mattered to them. We couldn’t generate questions until they had introduced themselves to us, in their own way and in their own environment. Once we had a better feel for what Virginians cared about and how they approached things, we could then structure specific questions for quantitative research. Politics and culture are so intertwined that one cannot usually study one without the other.
So, along with Mark Gettleson, Brent Clickard, and a few others, I flew to America, arriving in Virginia in October 2013, shortly before statewide elections there. One of the things we heard in focus groups was concern about the Republican candidate for governor, the former state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli. He was a super-right-wing type who had advocated for initiatives to roll back gay rights and fight environmental protections. The Republican Party in Virginia has an enormous bloc of evangelical Christian voters, and Cuccinelli needed them if he was going to win. But, as we discovered in our research, he went so hard after their votes, he overshot his mark.
One of Cuccinelli’s initiatives was to petition a federal court to reverse its ruling on Virginia’s “Crimes Against Nature” law. Originally passed in 1950 and formally struck down in 2013 by the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (in light of a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision to decriminalize sexual activity between consenting adults), the statute technically outlawed oral and anal sex. Cuccinelli argued that the law was needed to combat pedophilia. On paper, he reminded me of crazed politicians we’d encountered in parts of Africa, obsessed with gays and their bedroom sins. But social extremists and weirdos can be found anywhere, even in white-bread America.
People in our focus groups—particularly straight, red-blooded American men—kept saying how weird they thought this was. Ban the gay stuff, sure, but why ban all non-procreative sex? Why was Cuccinelli so opposed to blow jobs? Let’s be real—isn’t that a little weird? These guys kept talking about how they didn’t like thinking about Cuccinelli and getting head, and who could blame them? We kept hearing about this issue, so we decided to try an experiment.
In the five-factor model of personality, conservatives tend to display a combination of two traits: lower openness and higher conscientiousness. In the most general way, Republicans aren’t likely to seek out novelty or to express curiosity about new experiences (with closet cases being the obvious exception). At the same time, they favor structure and order, and they don’t like surprises. Democrats are more open but also often less conscientious. This is in part why political debates often center around behavior and the locus of personal responsibility.
Our qualitative research told us, among many other things, that Virginia Republicans were put off by Cuccinelli’s obsession with blow jobs. And psychometric testing also told us that Republicans don’t like unpredictability. Could we create a strategy, using those two observations, to move the needle of opinion on Cuccinelli?
This was where Gettleson’s brilliance came into play. He was particularly fascinated by alpha-male voters and Cuccinelli’s conundrum with them, but he also knew it would be tricky to thread the needle in terms of message. So he focused on the weirdness factor. People were put off because they thought Cuccinelli was being weird. What if his messaging acknowledged that? We decided to test a message that simply stated, “You might not agree, but at least you know where I stand.” That way, even if people thought his position was crazy, at least he could turn it into a predictable and ordered kind of crazy.
We convened focus groups, online panels, and digital ad tests to try out the slogan, and it outperformed all the other messages we tried—even though it was essentially meaningless. This was a big realization: We were able to sway voters’ opinions by tailoring the candidate’s message to match their psychometric tests. And because so many Republicans display these personality traits, that framing device—I am who I am, and you know where I stand—would probably work equally well for other Republicans. This strategy performed better among high scorers in conscientiousness who had been unsure about Cuccinelli. For them, it framed Cuccinelli as “the devil you know” and positioned his salient “quirkiness” as at least a reliable quirkiness.
It turns out that Republicans can accept a batshit insane candidate, so long as it’s consistent insanity. This finding later informed almost everything that Cambridge Analytica worked on. From there, of course, it’s a short jump to having a candidate brag that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without losing support.
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IN THE COURSE OF our experiment, we compiled reams of personal information about the people of Virginia. It was easy to get—we just bought access to it through data brokers such as Experian, Acxiom, and niche firms with specialist lists from evangelical churches, media companies, and so on. Even some state governments will sell you lists of hunting, fishing, or gun licensees. Did the state government bureaus care, or even bother to ask, where this data on their citizens was going? Nope. We could have been fraudsters or foreign spies and they wouldn’t have had a clue.
Most people know Experian as a consumer credit reporting company. That’s how it started out, calculating credit scores for people based on a variety of financial factors. The company would collect information from a wide array of sources—airline memberships, media companies, charities, even amusement parks. It also gathered information from government agencies, such as the DMV, fishing and hunting licensing, and gun licensing. As it compiled these detailed profiles, the company realized it could make additional money using them for marketing.
In the 1990s, political strategists started buying personal information to use in campaigns. Think about it: If you know what kind of car or truck a person drives, whether they hunt, what charities they give to, and what magazines they subscribe to, you can start to form a picture of that person. Many Democrats and Republicans have a look. And their look was captured in this data snapshot. You can then target potential voters based on that information.
We also got access to census data. Unlike developing nations with less stringent privacy controls, the U.S. government won’t provide raw data on specific individuals, but you can get information, down to the county or neighborhood level, on crime, obesity, and illnesses such as diabetes and asthma. A census block typically contains six hundred to three thousand people, which means that by combining many sources of data, we could build models that infer those attributes about individuals. For example, by referencing risk or protective factors for diabetes, such as age, race, location, income, interest in health food, restaurant preference, gym membership, and past use of weight-loss products (all of which are available in most U.S. consumer files), we could match that data against aggregated statistics about a locality’s diabetes rates. We could then create a score for each person in a given neighborhood measuring the likelihood that they had a health issue like diabetes—even if the census or consumer file never directly provided that data on its own.
Gettleson and I spent hours exploring random and weird combinations of attributes. Were there people who had gun licenses but also belonged to the ACLU? W
ere there people who had season tickets to a symphony and a lifetime NRA membership? Are gay Republicans even real? One day we found ourselves wondering whether there were donors to anti-gay churches who also shopped at organic food stores. We did a search of the consumer data sets we had acquired for the pilot and found a handful of people whose data showed that they did both.
I instantly wanted to meet one of these mythical creatures, in part because I was curious but also because I wanted to make sure our data was accurate. We pulled the names that came up, then sent them to a call center, where agents phoned each person to ask if they’d be willing to meet with a researcher to answer some questions. Most said no, but there was one woman who agreed—and whom I couldn’t wait to meet. Her spending habits seemed all over the map—a Whole Foods shopper with an interest in yoga, but also a member of an anti-gay church and a donor to right-wing charities—which made me suspect that either our data was somehow faulty or this person was among the most fascinating characters in the United States.
The woman’s data guided me to a modest split-level in the suburbs of Fairfax County. For a moment, I hesitated. “Ugh, is this going to be awkward?” But I’d come all this way, so I walked up to the door and rang the bell. I heard wind chimes just over my head. Then a perky blonde with blown-out hair opened the door and almost leapt at me. “HEYYYY!!! Come on in!” As we entered the house I noticed she was indeed wearing Lululemon yoga pants. She showed me into her living room, which smelled of incense and had statues of both Buddha and the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh. Then I spotted a crucifix on the wall. It was all pretty extra.
When she offered me a glass of homemade kombucha, I accepted. In the kitchen, she opened a large jar of something and poured an extremely ripe and slightly coagulated liquid into a glass.
“It’s really probiotic.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” I answered, looking at the floating chunks in the glass.
As we started talking, she spoke in New Age terms about trying to “align her positive energy,” inspired, no doubt, by the Deepak Chopra on her bookshelf. But when we started talking about morality, she shifted abruptly into fire-and-brimstone evangelical views—particularly about gay people, who she knew were going straight to hell (no pun intended). Yet even the way she expressed that belief was a strange amalgamation: She said that being gay was like a block in your energy—a sinful block. She evangelized to me for two hours as I sat there scribbling notes, as though we were participants in some kind of messed-up therapy session.
I came away from that encounter swirling with ideas. I felt like I was on to something important, because how the hell would a pollster classify this woman? This convinced me we needed to invest more in understanding the nuances behind the demographics. I once met the primatologist Jane Goodall, and she said something that always stuck with me. Mingling at a reception, I asked why she researched primates in the wild instead of in a controlled lab. It’s simple, she said: Because they don’t live in labs. And neither do humans. If we are to really understand people, we have to always remember that they live outside of data sets.
It’s amazing how easy it is to get drawn into something you are interested in. We were a British military contractor, working on big ideas, with a growing team of mostly gay and mostly liberal data scientists and social researchers. So why had we started working with this eclectic mix of hedge fund managers, computer scientists, and a guy who ran a niche right-wing website? Because the idea was a killer one. With free rein to study such an abstract and fluid thing as culture, we could be breaking into a new field of researching societies. If we could put society into a computer, we could start to quantify everything and encapsulate problems like poverty and ethnic violence in a computer; we could simulate how to fix them. And just as the woman did not see the contradictions in her idols, I did not yet see the contradiction in what I was doing.
CHAPTER 5
CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
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In the course of home visits and focus groups in the autumn of 2013, we found Virginia contained a quintessential cross section of American life. We toured from Fairfax through the middle of the state, and then headed down to Norfolk and Virginia Beach, stopping in at local bars and mom-and-pop restaurants, where we welcomed the ambience as much as the sustenance. Indeed, you can learn a lot from the ways people eat, drink, and talk. Sweet tea and certain foods became pet obsessions after we discovered their cultural significance. If the American South was traditionally delineated by the old Mason-Dixon Line, which marked the border between slave owners and free states, a different divide cut through contemporary Virginia, where restaurants to the north served tea unsweetened and those to the south served it sweet. Here began the “real South,” the locals informed us—at the Sweet Tea Line, not just south of Mason-Dixon but farther south than Richmond too.
My favorite activities were to watch and listen to the Americans who agreed to let us spend time with them. I would sit on the sofa and eavesdrop on people talking about their day, or what they heard on the radio, or office politics. I would watch people watching Fox News and notice how furious they would get (which, because I came from a country without Fox News, was one of the most interesting things to see). It was a weird performance, as they would sit down waiting—and expecting—to be insulted by whatever the “elites” had done to them that day. They would flip on Fox and their rage became palpable. Sometimes I seemed to be witnessing a therapy session, like when people smash things in a rage room after a frustrating week. This was quite the juxtaposition to what I was normally used to seeing when my friends would happen to stumble upon Fox News. I distinctly remember Alistair Carmichael once referred to a shouty, red-faced Fox News correspondent as a “slapped arse.”
One couple told me about the thousands of dollars they owed for their insurance deductibles and how they would sometimes skimp on their prescriptions because they had to repair their car that month. They’d agreed to the interview because the $100 they received would get them closer to covering next month’s costs. But who did they blame for their insurance costs? Not their employer’s bad health plan or a lack of decent pay—they blamed Obamacare. They genuinely thought it was rolled out simply to help more undocumented workers come to America in a grand plan of liberal social engineering to keep the Democrats in power through more Democrat-leaning Latino voters, which in their minds made insurance and hospitals more expensive.
People would feel better about their day after an hour-long session in the Fox News rage room—they could groan out their stress, and afterward their problems at work or home were someone else’s fault. It meant that their struggles could be wholly externalized, sparing them the stark reality that maybe their employer didn’t care enough about them to give them a living wage. It would be too painful to admit that perhaps they were being taken advantage of by someone they saw every day rather than the faceless enemy of Obamacare and “illegals.”
This was my longest exposure to Fox News, and all I could think about was how the network was conditioning people’s sense of identity into something that could be weaponized. 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.
With their guards down, Fox’s audience is then told they are part of a group of “ordinary Americans.” This identity is hammered home over and over, which is why there are so many references to “us” and direct chatting to the audience by the moderators. The audience is reminded that if you are really an “ordinary American,” this is how you—i.e., “we”—think. This primes people for identity-motivated reasoning, which is a bias that essentially makes people accept or reject inf
ormation based on how it serves to build or threaten group identity rather than on the merits of the content. This motivated reasoning is how Democrats and Republicans can watch the exact same newscast and reach the opposite conclusion. 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.