Quantifying the potential persuasive returns to political microtargeting.

Much concern has been raised about the power of political microtargeting to sway voters' opinions, influence elections, and undermine democracy. Yet little research has directly estimated the persuasive advantage of microtargeting over alternative campaign strategies. Here, we do so using two studies focused on U.S. policy issue advertising. To implement a microtargeting strategy, we combined machine learning with message pretesting to determine which advertisements to show to which individuals to maximize persuasive impact. Using survey experiments, we then compared the performance of this microtargeting strategy against two other messaging strategies. Overall, we estimate that our microtargeting strategy outperformed these strategies by an average of 70% or more in a context where all of the messages aimed to influence the same policy attitude (Study 1). Notably, however, we found no evidence that targeting messages by more than one covariate yielded additional persuasive gains, and the performance advantage of microtargeting was primarily visible for one of the two policy issues under study. Moreover, when microtargeting was used instead to identify which policy attitudes to target with messaging (Study 2), its advantage was more limited. Taken together, these results suggest that the use of microtargeting-combining message pretesting with machine learning-can potentially increase campaigns' persuasive influence and may not require the collection of vast amounts of personal data to uncover complex interactions between audience characteristics and political messaging. However, the extent to which this approach confers a persuasive advantage over alternative strategies likely depends heavily on context.

Emotion prediction as computation over a generative theory of mind.

From sparse descriptions of events, observers can make systematic and nuanced predictions of what emotions the people involved will experience. We propose a formal model of emotion prediction in the context of a public high-stakes social dilemma. This model uses inverse planning to infer a person's beliefs and preferences, including social preferences for equity and for maintaining a good reputation. The model then combines these inferred mental contents with the event to compute 'appraisals': whether the situation conformed to the expectations and fulfilled the preferences. We learn functions mapping computed appraisals to emotion labels, allowing the model to match human observers' quantitative predictions of 20 emotions, including joy, relief, guilt and envy. Model comparison indicates that inferred monetary preferences are not sufficient to explain observers' emotion predictions; inferred social preferences are factored into predictions for nearly every emotion. Human observers and the model both use minimal individualizing information to adjust predictions of how different people will respond to the same event. Thus, our framework integrates inverse planning, event appraisals and emotion concepts in a single computational model to reverse-engineer people's intuitive theory of emotions. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Cognitive artificial intelligence'.

Listening with generative models.

Perception has long been envisioned to use an internal model of the world to explain the causes of sensory signals. However, such accounts have historically not been testable, typically requiring intractable search through the space of possible explanations. Using auditory scenes as a case study, we leveraged contemporary computational tools to infer explanations of sounds in a candidate internal generative model of the auditory world (ecologically inspired audio synthesizers). Model inferences accounted for many classic illusions. Unlike traditional accounts of auditory illusions, the model is applicable to any sound, and exhibited human-like perceptual organization for real-world sound mixtures. The combination of stimulus-computability and interpretable model structure enabled 'rich falsification', revealing additional assumptions about sound generation needed to account for perception. The results show how generative models can account for the perception of both classic illusions and everyday sensory signals, and illustrate the opportunities and challenges involved in incorporating them into theories of perception.