Psychographic profiling of millions of Facebook users by data firm Cambridge Analytica is a watershed event in the history of digital technology’s social impact -- the moment when the co-development of the psychological and computational sciences became a matter of public concern. Through the application of insights from psychology, social media users are profiled and categorized around their personality traits. Although newly brought to the public attention, this intersection of psychology, computing, marketing and politics is the logical outgrowth of the past half-century. The increasing centrality of algorithmic psychometrics offers a crucial opportunity for historians to contextualize the human sciences in broader histories of digital technology, business, and politics.
This roundtable brings together rising scholars working on histories of psychology, computing, marketing and politics. We are inspired by the following questions: where can the influence of psychological sciences be seen as components of contemporary data science, machine learning, user experience design and massive data analysis? How has the history of psychology, psychometrics, and personality testing shaped our contemporary digitally-mediated business cultures? How have underpublicized histories (for instance of women, racial minorities, and/or LGBTQ people) played a role in the construction of these quantitative forms of knowledge, and what forms of knowledge have been effaced as a result? What are the political stakes in these relationships between computation and the psy sciences within systems of digital control? And lastly, what is the role that historians of science can play in contextualizing this political moment, within and outside the academy?
Co-organized by Kira Lussier ( University of Toronto) and Luke Stark (Dartmouth College/Microsoft Research)
