Neuropolitics: Campaigns Try to Read Your Mind - Facial coding, biometrics, brain imaging used by pols...
Neuropolitics, Where Campaigns Try to Read Your Mind
By KEVIN RANDALL NOV. 3, 2015
In the lobby of a Mexico City office building, people
scurrying to and fro gazed briefly at the digital billboard backing a candidate
for Congress in June.
They probably did not know that the sign was reading
them, too.
Inside the ad, a camera captured their facial expressions
and fed them through an algorithm, reading emotional reactions like happiness,
surprise, anger, disgust, fear and sadness.
With all the unwitting feedback, the campaign could then
tweak the message — the images, sounds or words — to come up with a version
that voters might like better.
All over the world, political campaigns are seeking voter
data and insights that will propel them to victory. Now, in an increasing
number of places, that includes the contentious field known as neuromarketing —
or in this case, neuropolitics.
Technologies like facial coding, biofeedback and brain
imaging have long been used by companies in the hope of pushing the boundaries
of marketing and product development. But their use by political parties and
governments is a growing phenomenon, evoking futuristic scenes from the movie
“Minority Report,” in which eerily well-informed billboards scan commuters’
eyes and call out to them by name.
The practice has come under attack, especially by
academics who accuse neuromarketers of selling junk science.
But the skepticism has not dissuaded political parties in
many parts of the world. According to campaign records, the campaigns of
presidents and prime ministers on at least three continents have hired science
consultants to scan voters’ brains, bodies and faces, all with the aim of
heightening their emotional resonance with the electorate.
In Mexico, President Enrique Peña Nieto’s campaign and
his party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, employed tools to
measure voters’ brain waves, skin arousal, heart rates and facial expressions
during the 2012 presidential campaign. More recently, the party has been using
facial coding to help pick its best candidates, one consultant says. Some
officials even speak openly about their embrace of neuropolitical techniques,
and not just for campaigning, but for governing as well.
“In my government, we have utilized a variety of research
tools and opinion studies to evaluate the efficacy of our governmental
programs, communications and messages,” said Francisco Olvera Ruiz, the
governor of the Mexican state of Hidalgo and a governing party member.
“Neuroscience research,” he added, is “especially valuable because it has
allowed us to discover with more precision and objectivity what people think,
perceive and feel.”
In Poland, Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz and her party, Civic
Platform, worked closely with a neuromarketing firm ahead of parliamentary
elections last month (they lost), and in Colombia, President Juan Manuel
Santos’s re-election team in 2014 tapped into the same neuropolitical
consultancy advising Mexico’s governing party (he won).
In Turkey, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his Justice
and Development Party hired a Turkish neuromarketing company for the June 2015
election, according to the firm’s co-founder and chief executive. Using a mix
of techniques — like tracking the brain waves, eyes, faces, skin and heart
rates of volunteers in its laboratory in Istanbul — the company said that it
warned that Mr. Davutoglu was not emotionally engaging voters in his speeches.
The party had a major setback in the June vote, but then won in elections this
month.
Neuromarketing consultants say they are conducting
research like this in more than a dozen countries, including Argentina, Brazil,
Costa Rica, El Salvador, Russia, Spain and, to a much lesser extent, the United
States.
One neuromarketing firm says it has worked for a Hillary
Rodham Clinton presidential campaign committee to help it improve its targeting
and messages. When contacted about it, Joel Benenson, the Clinton campaign’s
chief strategist, declined to discuss the matter, saying that he would not talk
about “what methodologies we use or don’t use.”
John Weaver, who was part of several Republican
presidential campaigns, including John McCain’s, and is now the chief
strategist for John Kasich’s presidential bid, said that he had used
neuroscientific tools in the past, but that the field’s adoption in the United
States was “very limited.”
Neuroconsultants and some of their political patrons
argue that the benefits are obvious: Focus groups and surveys can be unreliable
because voters often do not know, cannot articulate or are reluctant to say how
they really feel about a candidate.
Brain waves, facial expressions and neurobiology, by
contrast, betray a voter’s feelings and opinions, making them a better
predictor of behavior at the polls, proponents argue.
But some neuroscientists have been sharply critical of
the field for overpromising results. They argue that just because a candidate
or a speech prompts activity in a particular region of the brain, that does not
mean researchers can be sure of what voters are thinking.
“For the most part, I think that companies selling
neuroscience-based market research tools are taking advantage of people’s
natural tendency to think that measurements of the brain are somehow more
‘real’ than measurements of behavior,” said Russell Poldrack, a psychology
professor at Stanford University.
Many political parties and campaigns are loath to talk
about their forays into neuropolitics, with many disavowing them or saying they
did not believe the research was widely used. Even if the techniques work, the
potential fallout from being connected to such methods could be significant.
“Imagine headlines in The Daily Mail or The Sun about
brainwashing, lab rats and manipulation,” read a recent article about the
techniques posted by Mediatel, which focuses on the British news media.
The top three market research companies in the world —
Nielsen, Kantar and Ipsos — do conduct neuromarketing research for big brand
names and are upfront about it. But all three said they had a policy of not
doing this type of research for political clients.
Some neuroconsultants are open about what they do. Dr.
Jaime Romano Micha, a Mexican neurophysiologist, has spent decades trying to
understand the human brain and helping children with neurological and
psychological disorders. A clinic he founded says it has treated more than
30,000 patients.
Dr. Romano Micha’s work eventually spread to consumer
marketing, and then, more recently, to politics after Mexican politicians
approached him.
Dr. Romano Micha said Mexico’s governing party hired his
firm, Neuropolitika, in the run-up to the 2012 national election to assess
competing candidates and opportunities for Mr. Peña Nieto to connect with
Mexican citizens.
Dan Hill, a facial coder in the United States, said the
campaign also commissioned him to analyze expressions on the faces of Mexican
voters and candidates during presidential debates.
Both said they told the Peña Nieto team to take the
leftist candidate more seriously than the conservative contender. Mr. Peña
Nieto ended up winning the national vote by six percentage points over the
leftist candidate. The conservative candidate finished third.
Then in state and local elections this June, Dr. Romano
Micha said he warned the PRI about widespread voter frustrations, though the
phenomenon probably would not have required a scientist to point out.
“We warned well in advance of the high rejection level
towards the three main Mexican parties,” he said. “Through our neuronal
studies, we saw how voter sympathy levels, approach/withdraw and voting
intention variables were shifting.”
Since 2008, the neuromarketing field in the United States
has consolidated, leaving much of the work in the hands of a few large research
firms. In Latin America and Europe, it is easier for smaller neuromarketing
start-ups and experimentation to crack the market, reflected in the growth of
neuromarketing companies and activity outside the United States over the last
several years.
Neuromarketing, often rebranded as “consumer
neuroscience” in response to the criticisms of the field, has quietly evolved
in many parts of the world. Most neuroresearch vendors now take great pains to
emphasize their adherence to scientific and industry standards, transparency
and ethics.
Today, neuropolitical projects are often an international
enterprise. A Spanish research firm, Emotion Research Lab, says it is
conducting automated facial coding for Mexican candidates at all levels of
government. A Polish company, Neurohm, says it has advised American
presidential campaigns over several election cycles. A political strategist
from Brazil, Paulo Moura, says he has recently applied neuropolitical
techniques for senior government officials in Russia.
In Mexico, Emotion Research Lab used the cameras embedded
in its digital sign to analyze onlookers’ facial reactions so the campaign
could rapidly adjust the message.
It may sound like dystopian fiction, but Maria Pocovi,
the firm’s founder, says the company has helped the PRI vet and select five
candidates according to how well their faces emote and emit.
Neuroconsultants contend that political interest in their
work is growing, yet they acknowledge it is still largely considered taboo.
“Citizens don’t know what neuromarketing is,” said Kilinc
Orhan Erdemir, the co-founder and chief executive of Neuro Discover, who said
he worked for the governing party in Turkey’s 2015 election. “They see it as a
mind manipulation technique. So politicians fear talking about it.”
Several American political consultants said neuropolitics
could become more prevalent in the 2016 presidential campaign.
David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager,
said the tools “would be new ground for political campaigns.”
Mr. Plouffe added: “The richness of this data compared to
what is gathered today in testing ads or evaluating speeches and debates, which
is the trusty old dial test and primitive qualitative methods, is hard to
comprehend. It gets more to emotion, intensity and a more complex understanding
of how people are reacting.”
But “the horrendous dial ratings on the bottom of
televised presidential debates,” he said, referring to the real-time reactions
of undecided voters shown on the television screen, “may now be replaced with
the only thing worse: sweat, eye and cardiac monitoring measurements of key
voter segments.”
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