{"id":33113,"date":"2017-01-02T22:46:50","date_gmt":"2017-01-03T06:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/microtargeting-of-low-information-voters"},"modified":"2017-06-04T08:26:38","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T15:26:38","slug":"microtargeting-of-low-information-voters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/microtargeting-of-low-information-voters","title":{"rendered":"Microtargeting of low-information voters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/microtargeting-of-low-information-voters.jpeg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A very seductive hypothesis: did Cambridge Analytica use its psychographics profiles to find the audience for our post-truth world? Did they target gullible voters on behalf of Trump\u2019s campaign? Why is a Cambridge Analytica employee reading about the Need for Cognition Scale?<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"http:\/\/urban.hunter.cuny.edu\/~schram\/trumplowinformationvotersfinal.pdf\" data-href=\"http:\/\/urban.hunter.cuny.edu\/~schram\/trumplowinformationvotersfinal.pdf\" class=\"\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">remarkable paper<\/a> (summarised <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/monkey-cage\/wp\/2016\/11\/07\/low-information-voters-are-a-crucial-part-of-trumps-support\/\" data-href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/monkey-cage\/wp\/2016\/11\/07\/low-information-voters-are-a-crucial-part-of-trumps-support\/\" class=\"\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>), Fording and Schram analysed some survey results from January 2016 and highlighted the disproportionate support for Trump among \u201clow-information voters\u201d. They define those as voters who either score low in political knowledge or low on the so-called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Need_for_cognition\" data-href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Need_for_cognition\" class=\"\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">Need for Cognition Scale<\/a>. The latter criterion means that they tend to make decisions based on heuristics rather than by thinking through the issue methodically. Of course, the two factors correlate: if you don\u2019t think much about politics, you are unlikely to know a lot about it and vice-versa.[1]<\/p>\n<p>Fording and Schram went on to assess the preference for Trump or Clinton segmented through those criteria. Because the data was collected in January, this is not expressed as a vote preference, but as a \u201cwarmth index\u201d (or a difference of warmth), in the Y-axis.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@pdehaye\/microtargeting-of-low-information-voters-6eb2520cd473#.or7cgrnak\">https:\/\/medium.com\/@pdehaye\/microtargeting-of-low-informatio....or7cgrnak<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A very seductive hypothesis: did Cambridge Analytica use its psychographics profiles to find the audience for our post-truth world? Did they target gullible voters on behalf of Trump\u2019s campaign? Why is a Cambridge Analytica employee reading about the Need for Cognition Scale? In a remarkable paper (summarised here), Fording and Schram analysed some survey results [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":368,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/368"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33113"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59291,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33113\/revisions\/59291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}