Please stop teaching psychology … or why Richard Dawkins is always right.
In my role as a Computer Science teacher I needed to prepare some classes for my students about social media. It’s in the syllabus, it was in the news; Facebook and data harvesting being the media’s ‘mot du jour’ . So I ‘did’ SnapChat, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook. But what struck me was I hadn’t got much to teach my students. The computing stuff was old and simple; TCP/IP comms, a bit of up to date compression and optional encryption; it was a bit all 1990. As a techie, its core was of little/no interest.
So who is interested in this stuff? I don’t mean the users of social media, obviously they are interested, but which ‘gods’ are watching over these applications?
A few years ago I looked at the UK graduate stats by subject. Without too much dissection it is safe to say that psychology graduates rather outnumber computer graduates by a factor over tenfold and much more than that if you only count females. Psychology is now rather hidden in the official stats as it is bundled into a category ‘subjects allied to medicine’. I suspect it was becoming embarrassing to discover how many budding ‘shrinks’ were in the pipeline.
So, take a bit of simple tech ( remember MS Instant Messaging, Skype?) add a generation of business and psychology graduates and what do you get? Social Media, the love child of a million psychology graduates looking for a job in selling anything from plastic frogs to conspiracy theories.
What does psychology qualify you for with regards to selling? … manipulation is the obvious answer. However to manipulate effectively you have to know your target. To know your target as an individual does not scale well, so called micro- targeting works really not on individuals but on quasi-homogeneous groups. It’s so much more than your browsing history and postcode
Here is how it’s done. Below is a homage to the great Richard Dawkins, author of the Selfish Gene and creator of the gene’s abstract replicator, the meme.
Social media platforms have something in common, the ability for a communication to be approved by a group or deprecated; more familiarly ‘liked’ or ‘disliked’. This is profound and if we borrow the logic and terms of evolutionary biology we can do the following steps:
A post, (maybe a picture/movie or an opinion) gains in value if it is liked and loses value if disliked. The direct analogy is with a selection pressure deriving from an environment. So an ecological niche corresponds to the social media group ( It may be big or small and highly specialised or less so just like nature). Being ‘liked’ is a bit like having the right beak to open the local nuts.
If we regard a post not just as one post, destined to survive or die, think of it as an instance of the user themselves; an abstract organism that is made manifest via it’s posting-phenotype. A subsequent post is actually a reproduction from that user. It’s not the same post obviously, but it inherits properties from earlier posts. ‘Liking’ a post makes it fitter to survive in its environment and subsequent posts will then inherit characteristics that caused it to be liked. Ideally being ‘liked’ even more becoming a more valuable property of the organism.
Vice-versa for dislikes you may think but not quite so. Consider a group of say 20 folk, a given post you notice is liked by 15+ on average, but consistently 1-3 dislike it. They do not have a selection pressure, they simply get ‘unfriended’ or whatever the term is in the software. If 15+ quite often don’t like your post then you must change or migrate out of the group. The latency built into the system increases with the size of the group but the principle remains true.
However you do it within your ecological nice ... psychological niche is the right phrase, ‘fitness’ to survive reflects an accretion of adaptations. And as in Nature, the drive is towards homogeneity, but without sex to stir the pot or an unyielding indifferent environment to provide external limits to change. A psychological niche is user-defined and so has no limits only homogeneity.
Now we have it, a group occupying a psychological niche can be characterised by the watching ‘gods’ through a process called data-harvesting. Once you know the psycho-nice well enough you can manipulate it, sell to it.
So that is where all those psychology graduates went. All they demand from the techies are more tools to harvest data from daft quizzes, geospatial data, face recognition and so on. Then it’s back to the ‘how the brain works’ books on behaviour and job done.
Micro-targeting bad examples: don’t try to sell ex-Nazi era thermal underwear to folk living in sunny Israel nor books on liberal democracy to an ISIS whatsapp group. They won’t buy.
So don’t blame the computer scientists for the evils of social media, the tech is not rocket science or even new. Blame an army of psychology graduates looking for a job who took our IP protocol and made a monster. All of this by the way is fully predicted by Scott Adams in his 1999 book The Dilbert Future: “Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century”.
