Thanks to what they’ve learned from university research, consultants like Matthew Kalmans have become experts in modern political persuasion.
A co-founder of Applecart, a New York data firm, Mr. Kalmans specializes in shaping societal attitudes by using advanced analytical techniques to discover and exploit personal connections and friendships.
His is one of a fast-growing collection of similar companies now raising millions of dollars, fattening businesses, and aiding political campaigns with computerized records of Facebook exchanges, high-school yearbooks, even neighborhood gossip. Applecart uses that data to try to persuade people on a range of topics by finding voices they trust to deliver endorsements.
“You can use this sort of technology to get people to purchase insurance at higher rates, get people to purchase a product, get people to do all sorts of other things that they might otherwise not be inclined to do,” said Mr. Kalmans, a 2014 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
And in building such a valuable service, he’s found that the intellectual underpinnings are often free. “We are constantly reading academic papers to get ideas on how to do things better,” Mr. Kalmans said.
That’s because scholars conduct the field experiments and subsequent tests that Mr. Kalmans needs to build and refine his models. “They do a lot of the infrastructural work that, frankly, a lot of commercial companies don’t have the in-house expertise to do,” he said of university researchers.
Yet the story of Applecart stands in contrast to the dominant attitude and approach among university researchers themselves. Universities are full of researchers who intensively study major global problems such as environmental destruction and societal violence, then stop short when their conclusions point to the need for significant change in public behavior.
Researcher Reluctance
Some in academe consider that boundary a matter of principle rather than a systematic failure or oversight. “The one thing that we have to do is not be political,” Michael M. Crow, the usually paradigm-breaking president of Arizona State University, said this summer at a conference on academic engagement in public discourse. “Politics is a process that we are informing. We don’t have to be political to inform politicians or political actors.”
Some influential researchers share that view. Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University whose study of flaws in human judgment earned him a 2002 Nobel prize in economics, said in an interview that researchers should scrupulously avoid politics and set a broad definition for the term: If it’s a matter “that anybody in Congress is going to be offended by, then it’s political.”
But other academics contemplate that stance and see a missed opportunity to help convert the millions of taxpayer dollars spent on research into meaningful societal benefit. They include Dan M. Kahan, a professor of law and of psychology at Yale University who has been trying to help Florida officials cope with climate change.
Mr. Kahan works with the four-county Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, which wants to redesign roads, expand public transit, and build pumping stations to prepare for harsher weather. But Mr. Kahan says he and his Florida partners have had trouble getting enough policy makers to seriously consider the scale of the problem and the necessary solutions.
It’s frustrating, Mr. Kahan said, to see so much university research devoted to work inside laboratories on problems like climate, and comparatively little spent on real-world needs such as sophisticated messaging strategies. “There really is a kind of deficit in the research relating to actually operationalizing the kinds of insights that people have developed from research,” he said.
‘We don’t solve these problems by crawling in a hole, and massaging a whole bunch of data.’
That deficit appears to stem from academic culture, said Utpal M. Dholakia, a professor of marketing at Rice University whose work involves testing people’s self-control in areas such as eating and shopping. He then draws conclusions about whether regulations or taxes aimed at changing behaviors will be effective.
Companies find advanced personal behavioral data highly useful, said Mr. Dholakia, who works on the side to help retailers devise sales strategies. But his university, he said, appears more interested in seeing him publish his findings than take the time to help policy makers make real-world use of them. “My dean gets very worried if I don’t publish a lot.”
Because universities have been reluctant to push big data and analytics into public-policy realms, it’s hard to assess exactly how useful those techniques could be — and where the ethical lines should be.
Behavioral data-crunching “absolutely” could be used to reshape entrenched attitudes in areas of societal challenge, said Mr. Kalmans, whose company has been working for the Republican presidential candidate John Kasich but is seeking more work with advocacy organizations.
It’s not a stretch to suggest that university researchers could become adept at using tactics like Mr. Kalmans’s, either to influence public behaviors or to show others how to do it, said Lynda Tran, a founding partner at 270 Strategies, a Democratic-leaning version of Applecart whose customers include the Obama presidential campaigns. The basic components of the practice should be familiar to many researchers, Ms. Tran said: “At its core, it’s basically multivariate regression analysis.”
Whether that’s worth doing is another question. In areas like global warming, researchers have already tried “very, very hard” to influence public behavior, said Michael B. Gerrard, a professor of professional practice at Columbia University and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “I don’t think most of this is susceptible to most of the sorts of solutions that are developed in academia.”
Defining What’s Allowed
Even within Google, one of the giants of big data, there are conflicting views. The company recently recruited Thomas R. Insel, longtime director of the National Institute of Mental Health, to head a project that would apply algorithms to data in the hope of detecting early signs of psychoses. Yet one of the company’s intellectual paragons, Vinton G. Cerf, is dubious about the broad ability of big data to solve society’s major challenges.
In the real world, people need tangible incentives to make meaningful change, said Mr. Cerf, the web pioneer who holds the titles of vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google. “We don’t solve these problems by crawling in a hole, and massaging a whole bunch of data, and getting an analytic result,” he said.
Then there are matters of propriety and legality. The Republican Ted Cruz has moved into the upper ranks of his party’s crowded presidential contest with the assistance of statisticians and behavioral psychologists who help his campaign set personalized tones and topics for emails, phone calls, and even at-home visits. The increasingly aggressive nature of such data collection has left companies like Facebook and government regulators struggling to define what is allowed, both for research purposes and for private uses.
Even stricter limits are involved when the government is legally responsible for the messaging. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office ruled in December that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had illegally sought political support for a clean-water regulation when it asked people to post positive comments on social media.
With those and many other potential pitfalls in mind, some data experts in academe are urging restraint toward corporate, governmental, and political clients. At an international cryptographic conference in December, Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis, pleaded with his colleagues to think hard about the possible human effects of their work before they agree to help any particular project. “The problem occurs,” Mr. Rogaway said, “when our community, as a whole, systematically devalues utility or social worth.”
But other scholars argue that society faces greater risks from scientists abstaining while others around them rush to deploy all available technologies in ways that aren’t always positive and constructive.
Coming generations face two fundamental shifts that researchers aren’t adequately addressing, said Braden R. Allenby, a professor of engineering and ethics at Arizona State. One is the reality that the planet is undeniably being shaped by human activity, Mr. Allenby said. The other is that genomic sciences are redesigning our understanding of a human life.
“So the human becomes a design space, the planet is terraformed, and the complexity and the moral and ethical implications of those two fundamental shifts are ones that we haven’t begun to deal with,” Mr. Allenby said. “Not in universities, certainly not in government, and not in granting organizations.”
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
