Boosting people’s ability to detect microtargeted advertising

Abstract

Online platforms’ data give advertisers the ability to “microtarget” recipients’ personal vulnerabilities by tailoring different messages for the same thing, such as a product or political candidate. One possible response is to raise awareness for and resilience against such manipulative strategies through psychological inoculation. Two online experiments (total $$N= 828$$ N = 828 ) demonstrated that a short, simple intervention prompting participants to reflect on an attribute of their own personality—by completing a short personality questionnaire—boosted their ability to accurately identify ads that were targeted at them by up to 26 percentage points. Accuracy increased even without personalized feedback, but merely providing a description of the targeted personality dimension did not improve accuracy. We argue that such a “boosting approach,” which here aims to improve people’s competence to detect manipulative strategies themselves, should be part of a policy mix aiming to increase platforms’ transparency and user autonomy.

Time Pressure Reduces Misinformation Discrimination Ability But Does Not Alter Response Bias

“…Ultimately, using insights from more process-based approaches will make it possible to create better-informed, individuallytailored interventions. Such interventions could improve decision making by targeting specific individual characteristics, for example, by informing people about their partisan bias (see also 62 ).…”

Blinding to circumvent human biases: Deliberate ignorance in humans, institutions, and machines

“…Second, they can be used to manipulate people-citizens, voters, consumers-and distort economic and political competitions (Lewandowsky et al, 2020;Lorenz-Spreen et al, 2020). Online platforms' data and algorithms, for instance, give advertisers the ability to microtarget users' personal attributes and vulnerabilities (e.g., political persuasion or sexual orientation) by tailoring different messages for the same thing, such as a product or political candidate (Lorenz-Spreen et al, 2021). Third, many automated systems are, as alluded to before, "black boxes"-either highly complex or unavailable for external scrutiny due to business interests, which makes their decisions hard to trust (Rudin, 2019).…”

Countering Misinformation: Evidence, Knowledge Gaps, and Implications of Current Interventions

“…According to Hertwig and Grüne-Yanoff (2017, p. 974), the objective of boosts is "to improve people's competence to make their own choices", and that the focus of boosting is on "interventions that make it easier for people to exercise their own agency by fostering existing competences or instilling new ones", for example by improving people's ability to recognise microtargeted advertising (Lorenz-Spreen et al, 2021). Individuals are free to decide to disengage from boosts or not pay attention to them (as they are by nature nonmandatory and do not necessitate making changes to people's choice environment), making them unlikely to pose a significant ethical challenge or present major risks to the democratic process.…”

“…Boosting interventions may not always be effective, for example because they fail to reach the relevant people (Zollo et al, 2017). In addition, although a large number of lab studies has been published in recent years investigating the effectiveness of various types of boosting interventions (see Kozyreva et al, 2020;Lorenz-Spreen et al, 2021), key open questions are to what extent effectiveness in the lab translates to the real world , and how boosting competences translates to changes in people's behaviour. We discuss three types of interventions that seek to improve people's ability to identify misinformation, and therefore can be said to fall under the boosting banner: prebunking (with a focus on psychological inoculation), critical thinking, and media and information literacy.…”