Study: Microtargeting Works, Just Not the Way People Think

hubie writes:

In politics, tailored ads make sense, but with real limits to the tailoring:

Recent U.S. elections have raised the question of whether "microtargeting," the use of extensive online data to tailor persuasive messages to voters, has altered the playing field of politics.

Now, a newly-published study led by MIT scholars finds that while targeting is effective in some political contexts, the "micro" part of things may not be the game-changing tool some have assumed.

"In a traditional messaging context where you have one issue you're trying to convince people on, we found that targeting did have a substantial persuasive advantage," says David Rand, an MIT professor and co-author of the study.

Indeed, the study found that tailoring political ads based on one attribute of their intended audience - say, party affiliation - can be 70 percent more effective in swaying policy support than simply showing everyone the single ad that is expected to be most persuasive across the entire population. But targeting political ads using multiple attributes - for instance, ideology, age, and moral values - did not add any further benefit, in the study.
[...] Political microtargeting became the subject of extended attention after the 2016 U.S. elections, when it became widely known that the firm Cambridge Analytica had used data from Facebook to craft highly targeted messages to voters. What scholars have found less clear since then is: Did those ads work?

[...] "There has been a lot of speculation about the promises and perils of microtargeting for the functioning of our democratic system," Berinsky says. "Our study allows us to evaluate in a rigorous way the potential impact of political microtargeting in the real world."

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