Paul Basken at the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Thanks to what they’ve learned from university research, consultants like Matthew Kalmans have become experts in modern political persuasion. A co-founder of Applecart, a New York data firm, Mr. Kalmans specializes in shaping societal attitudes by using advanced analytical techniques to discover and exploit personal connections and friendships. His is one of a fast-growing collection of similar companies now raising millions of dollars, fattening businesses, and aiding political campaigns with computerized records of Facebook exchanges, high-school yearbooks, even neighborhood gossip.
Applecart uses that data to try to persuade people on a range of topics by finding voices they trust to deliver endorsements. “You can use this sort of technology to get people to purchase insurance at higher rates, get people to purchase a product, get people to do all sorts of other things that they might otherwise not be inclined to do,” said Mr. Kalmans, a 2014 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. And in building such a valuable service, he’s found that the intellectual underpinnings are often free. “We are constantly reading academic papers to get ideas on how to do things better,” Mr. Kalmans said. That’s because scholars conduct the field experiments and subsequent tests that Mr. Kalmans needs to build and refine his models. “They do a lot of the infrastructural work that, frankly, a lot of commercial companies don’t have the in-house expertise to do,” he said of university researchers. Yet the story of Applecart stands in contrast to the dominant attitude and approach among university researchers themselves. Universities are full of researchers who intensively study major global problems such as environmental destruction and societal violence, then stop short when their conclusions point to the need for significant change in public behavior.
Some in academe consider that boundary a matter of principle rather than a systematic failure or oversight. “The one thing that we have to do is not be political,” Michael M. Crow, the usually paradigm-breaking president of Arizona State University, said this summer at a conference on academic engagement in public discourse. “Politics is a process that we are informing. We don’t have to be political to inform politicians or political actors.” But other academics contemplate that stance and see a missed opportunity to help convert the millions of taxpayer dollars spent on research into meaningful societal benefit. They include Dan M. Kahan, a professor of law and of psychology at Yale University who has been trying to help Florida officials cope with climate change. Mr. Kahan works with the four-county Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, which wants to redesign roads, expand public transit, and build pumping stations to prepare for harsher weather. But Mr. Kahan says he and his Florida partners have had trouble getting enough
But Mr. Kahan says he and his Florida partners have had trouble getting enough policy makers to seriously consider the scale of the problem and the necessary solutions. It’s frustrating, Mr. Kahan said, to see so much university research devoted to work inside laboratories on problems like climate, and comparatively little spent on real-world needs such as sophisticated messaging strategies. “There really is a kind of deficit in the research relating to actually operationalizing the kinds of insights that people have developed from research,” he said. That deficit appears to stem from academic culture, said Utpal M. Dholakia, a professor of marketing at Rice University whose work involves testing people’s self-control in areas such as eating and shopping. He then draws conclusions about whether regulations or taxes aimed at changing behaviors will be effective. Companies find advanced personal behavioral data highly useful, said Mr. Dholakia, who works on the side to help retailers devise sales strategies. But his university, he said, appears more interested in seeing him publish his findings than take the time to help policy makers make real-world use of them. “My dean gets very worried if I don’t publish a lot.” Because universities h
That deficit appears to stem from academic culture, said Utpal M. Dholakia, a professor of marketing at Rice University whose work involves testing people’s self-control in areas such as eating and shopping. He then draws conclusions about whether regulations or taxes aimed at changing behaviors will be effective. Companies find advanced personal behavioral data highly useful, said Mr. Dholakia, who works on the side to help retailers devise sales strategies. But his university, he said, appears more interested in seeing him publish his findings than take the time to help policy makers make real-world use of them. “My dean gets very worried if I don’t publish a lot.” …(More)
