Boosting people's ability to detect microtargeted advertising.


Journal

Scientific reports
ISSN: 2045-2322
Titre abrégé: Sci Rep
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101563288

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
30 07 2021
Historique:
received: 26 03 2021
accepted: 15 07 2021
entrez: 31 7 2021
pubmed: 1 8 2021
medline: 1 8 2021
Statut: epublish

Résumé

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 [Formula: see text]) 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.

Identifiants

pubmed: 34330948
doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-94796-z
pii: 10.1038/s41598-021-94796-z
pmc: PMC8324838
doi:

Types de publication

Journal Article Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Langues

eng

Sous-ensembles de citation

IM

Pagination

15541

Informations de copyright

© 2021. The Author(s).

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Auteurs

Philipp Lorenz-Spreen (P)

Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany. lorenz-spreen@mpib-berlin.mpg.de.

Michael Geers (M)

Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

Thorsten Pachur (T)

Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

Ralph Hertwig (R)

Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

Stephan Lewandowsky (S)

School of Psychological Science and Cabot Institute, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.

Stefan M Herzog (SM)

Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

Classifications MeSH