social skills – Looking Forward

Continuing my annual round-up of news you may not have seen … about
politicians, polling and Google, and being smart and/or sympathetic.

Have you ever wanted to know when politicians were telling the truth? Fiona Zublin has proposed that
politicians be required to have on some wearable technology that will
continually assess their performance. As she puts it: “We should be
spying on our leaders instead of them spying on us.”

Part of
what drives a request like that is the feeling that politicians seem to
be increasingly out of touch with the public. Yet, one of the
complaints about politicians is that they are too dependent on polls to
determine what they’ll say and do. Perhaps this contradiction can be
explained by the weakness of the polls they depend on.

In the June issue of Campaigns and Elections magazine, Adam Schaeffer poses the question: “Is it time to pull the plug on traditional polling?”
He touches on just one of the ways that polls are not working, which
is their inaccurate predictions about who will actually vote.

And
if you think polling is off the mark, at least you can count on the value of
the actual election results. But those
too can be easily influenced. It’s been
known for quite some time that the order of names on the ballots has an effect –
perhaps a few percent – on how many votes go to each candidate. With people looking for information about
their candidates online, we now have the situation where WIRED writes that “Google’s Search
Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency”.

Robert
Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and
Technology who did the study of the effects of Google’s search algorithm provided
more detail in his article, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election: Google has
the ability to drive millions of votes to a candidate with no one the wiser” last
week in Politico:

“Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting
preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some
demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated,
according to experiments I conducted recently with Ronald E. Robertson…

“Given that many elections are won by small margins, this
gives Google the power, right now, to flip upwards of 25 percent of the
national elections worldwide…

“What we call in our research the Search Engine Manipulation
Effect (SEME) turns out to be one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered…

“Because SEME is virtually invisible as a form of social
influence, because the effect is so large and because there are currently no
specific regulations anywhere in the world that would prevent Google from using
and abusing this technique, we believe SEME is a serious threat to the
democratic system of government.”

With all the talk these days
about “smart” this and “smart” that, even “smart” politicians, it’s
worth reading James Hamblin’s piece, “100 Percent Is Overrated: People
labeled smart at a young age don’t deal well with being wrong. Life
grows stagnant.”

Being focused on academic perfection all
the time may be overrated, but some experts see the need to train
children in social skills. A summary of this argument can be found in a
NY Times article last month, “Teaching Social Skills to Improve Grades and Lives”.

If many people grow up without social skills, then people may turn to other means, as the Times reported earlier this month, “For Sympathetic Ear, More Chinese Turn to Smartphone Program”.

“She
is known as Xiaoice, and millions of young Chinese pick up their
smartphones every day to exchange messages with her, drawn to her
knowing sense of humor and listening skills. People often turn to her
when they have a broken heart, have lost a job or have been feeling
down. They often tell her, I love you.”

Perhaps
this also reflects a lack of social skills and empathy on the part of
Chinese political leaders as well. I wonder if they’re also using bad
polling 😉