Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion

By Sandra C. Matz, Michal Kosinski, Gideon Nave, David J. Stillwell. 2017

711 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance Building on recent advancements in the assessment of psychological traits from digital footprints, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of psychological mass persuasion—that is, the adaptation of persuasive appeals to the psychological characteristics of large groups of individuals with the goal of influencing their behavior. On the one hand, this form of psychological mass persuasion could be used to help people make better decisions and lead healthier and happier lives. On the other hand, it could be used to covertly exploit weaknesses in their character and persuade them to take action against their own best interest, highlighting the potential need for policy interventions. People are exposed to persuasive communication across many different contexts: Governments, companies, and political parties use persuasive appeals to encourage people to eat healthier, purchase a particular product, or vote for a specific candidate. Laboratory studies show that such persuasive appeals are more effective in influencing behavior when they are tailored to individuals’ unique psychological characteristics. However, the investigation of large-scale psychological persuasion in the real world has been hindered by the questionnaire-based nature of psychological assessment. Recent research, however, shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets. Capitalizing on this form of psychological assessment from digital footprints, we test the effects of psychological persuasion on people’s actual behavior in an ecologically valid setting. In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically tailored advertising, we find that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases. Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to-experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts. Our findings suggest that the application of psychological targeting makes it possible to influence the behavior of large groups of people by tailoring persuasive appeals to the psychological needs of the target audiences. We discuss both the potential benefits of this method for helping individuals make better decisions and the potential pitfalls related to manipulation and privacy.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Literature and Literary Theory, Marketing

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Citations in the corpus

Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking (2021, methodology): “In Myanmar, the military orchestrated a propaganda campaign on Facebook that targeted the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority group.”
Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective (2020, neutral): “To illustrate the power of this commerce, targeted ads based on personality characteristics inferred from the analysis of Facebook likes in combination with online survey questions can increase conversion rates by about 50 % (Matz et al. 2017).”
Task-Dependent Algorithm Aversion (2019, result): “This range of CTRs is comparable to other recent studies using Facebook advertising campaigns (Matz et al. 2017).”
The Ethics of AI Ethics: An Evaluation of Guidelines (2019, methodology): “Furthermore, countless companies strive for the opposite of human autonomy, employing more and more subtle techniques for manipulating user behavior via micro targeting, nudging, UX-design and so on (Fogg 2003; Matz et al. 2017).”
Human Trust in Artificial Intelligence: Review of Empirical Research (2020, background): “Additional support for the effect of personalization could be found in three field studies conducted by Matz, Kosinski, Nave, and Stillwell (2017).”
The potential of generative AI for personalized persuasion at scale (2024, background): “Compared to non-personalized communication, matching the content of a persuasive message (e.g., its language or visuals) to the psychological profile of its recipient enhances its effectiveness (e.g., 4,5 ).”
A Review and Conceptual Framework for Understanding Personalized Matching Effects in Persuasion (2020, result): “Although some analysts contest the extent of impact this approach had (Gibney, 2018), the viability of such a strategy has been confirmed by the laboratory studies just described as well as large-scale, digitally implemented field research (Matz et al., 2017).”
Generative AI (2023, neutral): “…that generative AI can automate the creation of personalized marketing content, for instance, different sales slogans for introverts vs. extroverts (Matz et al. 2017) or other personality traits as personalized marketing content is more effective than a one-content-ﬁts-all approach (Matz et al.…”
Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools (2019, background): “, sexual orientation, personality traits, political views), including information that can be exploited to psychologically target and manipulate users (Kosinski et al., 2013; Matz et al., 2017).”
Addictive Features of Social Media/Messenger Platforms and Freemium Games against the Background of Psychological and Economic Theories (2019, background): “[46] demonstrating how clicks and buys can be boosted by the use of personalized ads.”
Using a Personality-Profiling Algorithm to Investigate Political Microtargeting: Assessing the Persuasion Effects of Personality-Tailored Ads on Social Media (2020, neutral): “…have applied self-congruity in the context of advertising, offering support for the claim that messages are more effective when the content is tailored to people’s personal characteristics (e.g., Hirsh et al., 2012; Matz et al., 2017; Moon, 2002; Wheeler et al., 2005; Zarouali et al., 2018).”