Sandra Matz
Appearances
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so that's in a way that the most interesting part of this entire field of research is like, yeah, we can identify you as a person, we can know that it's Shankar based on your data. But for me, the more interesting part is actually that we can dive into your psychology. So we can take a look at what's going on inside your mind.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And so the study that we did when we try to predict someone's income was essentially relying on their Facebook data. So what is it that people talk about and post on social media? And I think there were some really interesting, sometimes quite uncomfortable truth that we discovered.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But overall, the bottom line was that just by looking at what you talk about on Facebook, we can have a pretty good sense of your socioeconomic status.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. So when you, when you start opening the black box, um, what you see is some of them are like, some of the cues are relatively obvious. So you can imagine that people with a lot of money, they talk about the vacations that they're going to take. They talk about expensive luxury brands, um, a lot more often than people who are struggling to, to make, um, ends meet.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But there's also these more subtle cues that I found, um, even more interesting, which is for example, that lower income people, um, they talk more about themselves and they talk more about the present. than higher income people. And in the beginning, you might be wondering, why might this be the case?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And I think it's just that it's really damn hard to think of anything else other than how you make the present work if you're struggling to make enough money to put food on the table. So those are all these little, I think, secrets about what's going on inside our mind that we can uncover in the data.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. And I think that's the distinction between identity claims and behavioral residue that I think is so interesting, right? So again, you might post about this luxury vacation, and it's a very clear signal to the world that you're having a great time and you can afford going on this vacation.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But then all of these more subtle ones where you talk about yourself, you're more focused on the present, that's certainly something that we don't necessarily intend to reveal.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so behavioral residue are all of the traces that we essentially inadvertently leave as we go about our life. In the offline context, you could imagine, again, that's like the bin overflowing, that's your socks not being organized, that's the bed not being made. And in the digital world, it's all of the traces that we generate without really thinking about it.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So that could be your smartphone, for example, captures your GPS records pretty much continuously 24-7. And you're not intentionally sitting down to create a record of where you went and what you did there. But still, those traces exist.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, that was really, so the research by Youyou Wu, I would say was one of the pivotal studies in this field because it showed just how accurate the predictions that we can make about someone's psychology really are based on relatively little data. So she was studying the Facebook pages that people follow. So let's say CNN has a Facebook page, you can like it.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And what she showed is that just by looking at your Facebook pages, an algorithm can actually predict your personality more accurately. than our co-workers could, than our friends could, than our family members could. And mind you, those are people who know you pretty well, right? Those are your parents, those are your siblings, those are your kids.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
They've spent a substantial amount of time with you. And it was slightly inferior to the judgments and the predictions of your significant other. Now, this was a study that was done in 2015. It was only based on Facebook likes. So you could imagine that if we get access to
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
all of your digital traces and apply slightly more sophisticated machine learning that we could probably outperform even your significant other.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. And I think what is astonishing to me, and I think a point that is important, those models aren't perfect, right? So I think any prediction always has a certain amount of error. And what we're talking about are averages. So on averages, these models are really accurate, as you just said, with a comparison. However, we still make mistakes at the individual level.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So one of the things when we kind of make these comparisons and predictions that I want to highlight is that don't take it as a truth, right? It's a prediction. It's a probability. It's pretty damn accurate on average, but we're still going to make mistakes at the individual level.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, I think of it as like this puzzle that we're putting together of a person. So you get a piece here that's their social media and then you get another piece that's their credit card spending and another piece that's their smartphone sensing data. And gradually you kind of see this person behind the data emerge. And what I think is fascinating about this combining data sources is essentially
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
A lot of people always say when I talk about social media that, well, isn't it just like this curated identity of who we are? It's just like who we want to be. We all like matcha lattes and amazing vacations. We're never sad. So it's just like the self-idealized version of who we really are. That's true for some of these identity claims, right? Social media.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But if you wanted to, let's say you wanted to pretend that you're more organized and conscientious than you do really are, maybe you can do this on Facebook for a couple of weeks. It's really, really difficult to do this across all data sources and across like months and months and months.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so I think part of it might be bias, right? One of the things that we're limited by as humans is we have only a sliver of experience and we have our own perspective on the world. And that's influencing every judgment that we make about other people. Now, we also have a lot less data to work with, right?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
If you look at the prediction of models that we build, they are looking at millions and millions and millions of data points. all integrating them at the same time, there's just no way that we have access to millions of millions of friendships that allow us to then judge someone's personality based on their behavior.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. Let's imagine it's like Sherlock Holmes with a million Watsons. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. So Google searches, if you think about that, Google is probably the closest confidant that we have, right? We ask Google questions that we don't even dare to ask our closest friends, our partners. So on some level, it's not surprising that whatever we search for on Google actually reveals a lot of what's going on inside. And that could
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
be anything from mental health to truth about society that we might not want to see. So one of a close friend, Seth Stevens Davidovich, and what he did is he looked at search data. So all of the searches that people make, and he was trying to uncover some of the relationships between what we search for and really kind of truths about society. So that could be anything from
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
What do people search for when they search for sex? Do people look for abortions more often than we actually see in the official data? Do people search for racist jokes more often than people would admit in public? So I think Google is really the source that captures what's going on inside our mind and stuff that we don't want to share with anyone else.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, that's right. And I think, again, if you look at the official polls, nobody wants to admit that. So those are correlations that you don't necessarily see showing up in survey data, but you do see them show up in these more hidden cues.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this was a study that we did where we looked at what's driving populist voting. And what we were particularly interested in is affect. So to what extent is this negative affect, and not just like the more aggressive negative affect like anger, which you oftentimes see talked about in the media, but also the more subtle ones like sadness and depression.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
To what extent are those emotions as they show up on social media linked to people voting for populist candidates? So one of the elections that we looked into was Brexit in the UK. So people voting to leave the European Union or the 2016 US presidential election.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And what you find consistently is that in areas where there's a lot of this negative affect showing up on social media, people are also more likely to vote for these populist candidates and causes.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. And you have all of these predictive models, right? So you have all of these predictive models trying to project what is the outcome of an election. None of them really consider tone or emotional valence based on social media.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so sometimes I think it's like the behaviors that you show, right? Shopping and Whole Foods is probably a proxy for some of the more psychological variables. That could be anything from openness, which we know is associated with being liberal, could be associated with socioeconomic status.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And the same way that negative emotions, for example, is associated oftentimes with a desire for change. And in that sense, it's not necessarily surprising that those people who feel currently bad about themselves are Want to vote for a candidate that promises change?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yes, happily. It's a village of 500 people in the very southwest corner of Germany. As you said, there's two restaurants, no shops, one church, I should say. That's very important to the people living there. And it was really like a small community.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So the idea here was that if we could make saving more appealing to people to make it more personally relevant, could we help them put that money, the extra money to the side? So we teamed up with Save a Life, which is a fintech company in the US. They are trying to help low income families save for a rainy day.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So the people that we work with were people with very low levels of savings, so less than $100. And our goal was to get them to add an additional $100 to their savings account over the course of four weeks. So we teamed up with the creative team of Save a Life and we essentially asked them, well, come up with with saving messages that try to encourage, say, people who are very agreeable.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So people who care about other people who care about their social relationships and maybe tell them that if you manage to put some money to the side right now, this is a great way of making sure that your loved ones are protected.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Now, if you're talking to someone who is much more competitive and critical, which is the other side of the same personality trait, maybe you want to highlight how just putting this money to the side gets them ahead of the game. So we kind of came up with this different type of messaging for all of the big five personality traits.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And then we just sent out the messages over the course of four weeks. And we looked at how many people eventually managed to save an additional $100. What did you find? So what we find is that essentially if we target people with the messages that were tailored to their personality, about 11% of the entire sample managed to put $100 to the site.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Now that's certainly far from perfect, but ideally we'd want this to be closer to 100%. But if you think about it, it means that someone is doubling their savings over the course of four weeks. And what's more important is that it was also much better than the existing messaging that Save a Life had been using up to this point.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So they had been trying to perfect their messaging over a couple of years, and we were still 60% better than the gold standard that they were using at the time.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Exactly. And you can think of it as essentially this is what we do all the time in our offline relationships. Pretty much any type of conversation that you have is to some extent tailored. You don't talk about the same things or in the same way to a friend or to your kid or to your boss.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So we're trying to replicate this at scale and just say, OK, what is it that you might care about and how can we make saving more appealing to you?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this is essentially research that we did with GPS records. So again, your phone tracks your GPS records pretty much 24 seven. And what we were interested in is whether we could tell whether someone might be suffering from depression or not, just based on these GPS records alone. Now, if you look at the content of some of these traces that we observed, they actually make a lot of sense.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. I must have been, I think, eight, nine years old. And I had this pet rabbit or bunny called Schnuffel. And he was living outside. We had built him this house outside, my dad and I. And one day the neighbor comes and says that they found him in their garden, feasting on their vegetables and salad. And so they tried to
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
What we found, for example, is that if you don't leave your house as much anymore as you typically did, or there's much less physical activity, you don't travel to as many places as you used to, those are all small indicators that there might be something going on.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It's certainly not a diagnostic tool, but it means that maybe we could be raising a red flag and say, hey, might be nothing, but why don't you check in with some support?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
yeah so i don't think it's a deterministic diagnostic tool but it could be incredibly helpful for people for example who know already that they're suffering from depression right so it's like one of these mental health challenges that just pop up time and again and it's really difficult to find your way out of the valley so once you enter the full-fledged depression it's really hard to come back and so if we can get these early indicators of well
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
maybe it's nothing but here's like a warning system that might alert you to well again there's like these changes in your behavior you're deviating from your typical routine why don't you reach out to someone and see if there's something to it
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. And you can do this in real time. And technically what you could also do if you're really thinking about this as a support system for the person is not just alert the user, but maybe I can give you the opportunity to name two people, loved ones, someone that you want to know that you're having a hard time, even if you're not in a position to tell them.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this is actually one of the projects that I personally care a lot about because there's still so many students dropping out with enormous debt that they never recover. So what we were trying to do is to see if we could predict early on, once people joined university in the first semester, whether we could see if they might be struggling integrating into the system, right?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Maybe they're not finding the information that they should be finding. Maybe they're not embedded in the cohort as much as other people, and they're somewhat on the fringes, not really connecting to the community as much. So we kind of, again, teamed up with a company called Ready Education. They had like a sense of what are the activities that students attending?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Are they talking to other students? Are they part of groups? Are they sending messages? Are they receiving messages? So we looked at all of these data traces. And again, once you combine all of them, you actually have a relatively decent sense of whether someone might be struggling and whether they might drop out at the end of the semester.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
catch him already but unsuccessfully and so they were trying to get more manpower so now my entire family is up their entire family is up we're trying to get him and I don't know if you've ever had a bunny or let alone try to catch one they're really fast So they zigzag around and it's almost impossible to catch them. So we must have looked like clowns running around.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, and for me, what I love most about this is essentially it creates a path to help students. And at the very bare minimum, what it allows administrators to do is identify at risk students, right? So if you see that there's some students who have a higher likelihood of dropping out, maybe you allocate more resources to helping them.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Now, for me, the even more interesting part is that we also get a sense of what is predicting dropout for each individual student. So it could be that I, for example, when I started university as a first-generation student, my problem was that I simply didn't know where all of the information was sitting. I didn't know how to get the literature. I didn't know where to search for information.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And so for me, if that was the prediction that the algorithm had made, administrators could have gone in and said, here's the information that you need. You can pop it up on my app. You can send it in my email. Just make sure that I see what I need to see. Now, there could be other people who know exactly. I know that most of my friends, when I started, knew exactly what they were looking for.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But some of them probably had a harder time integrating with the community and finding the friends and making these connections. So for those people, if we see that that's what's happening based on the algorithm, it's a totally different intervention. So then we're trying to see if we can get you involved in events more. Is there a way to ask other people to connect?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So the moment that you understand why someone is predicted to be a dropout, you can also adjust the approaches that you use to help them.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Exactly. It's the same as targeted advertising, right? So we kind of try and figure out what each person needs at a given point in time. Same for student dropout.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so there's really two things that the data has to offer. And I think of it as tracking and treating. So on some level, just all of the data that we generate says a lot about our physical activity, our physical health, but also about our mental health, right? Again, we talked about GPS records that say something about whether you might be suffering from depression.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
There's a lot that we can learn about your mental health from what you post on social media, right? So this is the tracking part. But then what I think is really interesting, and it's currently being developed, so I think we're really early stages, is more of the treatment part.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So can I use your footprints to not only surface, let's say, the most relevant interventions to you, the same way that Amazon recommends products and the same way that Netflix recommends movies, can actually an algorithm who knows you based on your data recommend the best treatment for you suffering from depression?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this is a really tragic story of a woman who got into an accident, got severely injured, lost the bakery that she was running. She was self-employed, which also meant that she couldn't afford a car anymore, couldn't really provide for her family. And you can imagine that all of this takes a pretty big toll on someone's mental health.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And that certainly didn't go unnoticed. So very soon into our hunt, I think the entire street really was involved. So we had someone was managing the traffic because the bunny would just kind of run from one side of the street to the next. And then we had like, it really felt like a command center.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
now with no car no money there's no way that you can either find a therapist let alone drive to a therapist for like your weekly session so what she did is she started using um an app that's called wiser which is really trying to interact with you give you advice ask questions about how you're feeling um gives these little prompts and little challenges maybe you go out to nature and maybe you try and meditate for a little bit and i think the way that she tells the story
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
is that it was very weird in the beginning talking to a bot about your mental health struggles, but at some point you adjust and you get used to it. And from using it once in a while, I think she started using it multiple times a day.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So in her case, I think it significantly improved her mental health. It certainly didn't fix all of the problems, right? And there's still a lot of effort that you have to put in as a human being. But it felt like there was a support system that she otherwise couldn't have afforded.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so I think if you have access to a human being, blood and flesh, who can be your therapist, that's probably preferable. However, there's this huge gap in terms of how many therapists there are and how many people are seeking therapy. So then there is a really huge need for people to get at least some support in cases where they can't get hold of a human being.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Oh, yeah, that's it's one of my favorite applications. But the idea here is that it actually offers this what I think of as like a magical echo chamber swap machine. And because it's really difficult for me to figure out, well, what is the reality of, let's say, a 50 year old guy in the middle of Ohio? I just don't have direct access, right?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So people were strategizing about whether we should set up a trap for the rabbit or whether we should just try to lure him in with a treat. Eventually we caught him, but it was certainly an adventure for the entire neighborhood.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It's really difficult for me to step into their shoes and see what does their day-to-day look like. Same for, let's say, a single mom in the suburbs of Chicago. But Google knows, right? Google knows exactly what those people see every day when they search for something specific. Facebook knows exactly what their newsfeed looks like every day.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So instead of keeping me in my own echo chamber and just feeding more of the stuff that I already know, they could actually allow me to hop into the echo chambers of other people.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so it could be an explorer mode, right? And the explorer mode at the very basic level could be, well, just do an echo chamber swap with someone. So maybe someone is happy to let you access their Facebook feed and you give them access to yours. At a more sophisticated level, they could build an engine that allows you to specify exactly which echo chamber you want to hop into, right?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I can say, here's the demographics of the person, here's the preferences, here's the age, gender, whatever you want to see, and then you can hop into the echo chamber. Now, I don't think we're going to use it all too often, right? The argument by Google is nobody would use it because it's so comfortable in our own echo chamber. And I think that is largely true.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Most of the time, we probably love to not have to go to page two of Google because we find what we want to see on page one. But I at least want to have the option. See, well, what is the search result for like immigration that someone with a totally different political ideology than me and a totally different part of the country sees that I would never otherwise get to see?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I think that's absolutely true. And in all fairness, some of it is human nature. So the reason for why these algorithms work and the reason for why companies craft them in their effort to make profits is because we love to see stuff that we believe in anyway. It's very comforting. It's very reassuring to see stuff that is aligned with our worldview.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So that's why I feel like this explorer mode is just one option that allows us to at least get some collective oversight. So even if we're not using it as much, it still means that we have an option to see what's happening on the other side.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It was a dramatic moment. So it was actually one of my neighbors who leaped and caught him on the back leg. And I just remembered the rabbits screaming. I didn't even know that rabbits could scream that loudly. And then all the kids were crying because the rabbit was screaming. And so I think the adults were just happy that we got him. But it was certainly a dramatic capture.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
it feels much more of a burden and a responsibility that we're not really equipped to take on.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so it was, I still remember it. It was like a red Suzuki Bandit. And it was, I thought it was beautiful. So I was 15, he was a bit older. And we would just take it from one village to the next through the hills and up and down the serpentines. And I loved riding it, but I was usually in the back. So at some point I think I got really tired of being in the back.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And I knew that I would have to wait for another three years, because in Germany you get your license at 18 at the earliest. So I kind of try to sneakily convince him to let me just try. I found this abandoned airfield and I just told him, let me just kind of ride for a few meters. You're going to get the bike back. It's all going to be good.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
He was a bit skeptical at first, but then agreed to let me try. So we start and I don't know exactly what happened. I think we must have kind of moved to the grass and I was trying to pull the bike back. But suddenly I think I just turn on the gas. And the bike rises. My boyfriend falls off the back and I just speed away. So I have no idea what I'm doing now.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Suddenly I'm alone on the bike without any sense of like how to handle it. I'm trying kind of going left and right and left and right. And at some point I essentially crash on the side. Luckily it was still going slowly, but there was my first experience riding the bike myself.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But in a way that wasn't the worst part. For me, the worst part was that I would say the minute we dropped the bike at the shop, everybody knew. So people knew about me asking my boyfriend to drive the bike, me crashing the bike, which was even worse. Otherwise, it could have potentially been a cool story, but certainly wasn't. So everybody knew what had happened.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And just I was punished for weeks after with people asking me about it.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Very, I mean, very different. So some neighbors actually just went back to their own childhood and they were like, oh, that's like such a brave and fun thing to do. And they just recounted their own childhood offenses. Others were like, how could you ever do this? We thought that you were actually one of the good kids on the block.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So, but it was just one conversation after the other that was all about me crashing the bike.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Certainly. I mean, I think that maybe not the bike surveillance. I think this one was a hard one. But generally speaking, the fact that my neighbors knew everything about my business also meant that there was a community that I felt safe in. So it was a community of people who knew me, who tried to help when I was looking for advice. And I've never quite experienced anything like it ever since.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I think so. I mean, some of them were just trying to interfere with my life, but some of the advice I got was incredibly helpful. So one of the ones that I still remember is that when I was finishing high school, I was thinking about doing a gap year. It sounded like a dream to me. I was like, well, you can travel the world, you can take a year off, don't rush into university.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But I remember being quite torn because not many of my friends were considering it. And I was, very ambitious, I would say at the time. So I was like, well, maybe it's just a waste of my time to spend a year traveling. I could start university, get a job. And luckily, a lot of my neighbors told me like, look, you seem like someone who's been always craving to leave this village to see some
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
some of the world. Why don't you do it? Like you can work for many, many years after you should really consider it. They helped me even find a job to scrape together the money. So I think that was one of the times that I felt very much supported.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
In some ways, I would say so. Because I think it was a slightly less biased and maybe self-critical version of myself.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, it's a funny story because I remember entering the apartment and you know, you meet someone for the first time, you have no idea who they are. And I entered the apartment and it's pristine. It's first of all, it has this huge library, which I loved and had books in Hebrew and English and French. So I was like, oh man, this is a bookworm. I love it already.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Walked to the kitchen, it's sparkling clean, which I cannot say of my own kitchen. So I was highly impressed in the sense that everything had its place. The knives were perfectly organized. I got some glasses for us and they were perfect. No marks, no watermarks anywhere.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And I just kind of started building this image of like who the person living in this apartment, the guy I was dating at the time, who he was. And it just felt like he was this curious, book-loving person with almost like an OCD sense of order.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It does feel like Sherlock Holmes. And I think we do this all the time, right? We meet someone new. We look for clues of who that person is. Could be their apartment. Could be what they're wearing. Could be what they're saying. It's really we're kind of trying to piece the puzzle pieces together in a way.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Well, it worked out really nicely. He's now my husband and we have a 10-month-old.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Very accurate. So I think he I would say he's probably the most curious person I know. He loves podcasts, loves reading, loves to learn everything about the world. And he also I have to say is a little bit OCD in a good way.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so this is actually work that inspired all of my research in the digital space. So Sam Gosling was one of the first people to try and figure out how good are strangers at judging our personality if they just take a look at our bedrooms and our offices. And he distinguished between these two types of cues that you can find.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So he said, well, some of the cues that you find in someone's office or bedroom
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
are the intentional identity claims that we that we put there right so we put up a poster um of lady gaga because that's the signal that we want to send to the world of well we're into music and this is the type of music that we like and but then there's also all of these other cues that we don't really think about right so the socks are disorganized the bed isn't made um it's the opposite of my husband it's just like probably a little bit more disorganized so what sam gosling really showed is that if you combine all of these things
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
you get a pretty good sense of who the person living in these places is.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, so in a way, right, so I could take a look at your office or your bedroom, or I could see what my neighbors are doing. But on some level, I think we all now live in this, what I think of as a digital village. And so we all leave these traces, these digital traces all the time. That could be anything from, The stuff that you post on social media.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So again, relatively explicit identity claims to the data that is captured by your smartphone. So GPS records, where do you go? Your credit card, what do you buy? And the same way that we could put the pieces together from someone's bedroom, we can also do that in someone's digital space.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah, it's actually one of my favorite studies that was coming out of MIT. And what they showed is that it's very easy to identify someone based on your spending records or your GPS records. So you can imagine, as you said, there's millions of people in New York.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And even if we, say, got access to all of their credit card spending, anonymized it so we don't have names, we don't have any personal identifiers, it's very easy to reverse engineer the data. You can imagine that, let's say, you
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
go and get a matcha latte at Starbucks on 72nd Street in New York at 7.20 a.m., then you have lunch in a certain place, and maybe you take a cab downtown at night, there's at some point only so many people who have exactly that same signature. So you can almost think of it as a fingerprint that is made up of your data.