A New Technology of Persuasion

Welcome, [FIRST NAME], to the era of personalization. Amazon.com recommends books you might like, Netflix tailors your movie menu, and Google customizes your news. And in exchange for this friendly algorithmic assistance, targeted ads follow you wherever you navigate online.

Most of us have accepted this bargain, but it turns out that taste profiling is only the beginning. A technique called persuasion profiling is just around the corner, and it doesn't just find content you might enjoy. It figures out how you think.

Today, most recommendation and targeting systems focus on the products: Commerce sites analyze our consumption patterns and use that info to figure out that, say, viewers of Iron Man also watch The Dark Knight. But new work by Maurits Kaptein and Dean Eckles, doctoral students in communications at Stanford University, suggests there's another factor that can be brought into play. Retailers could not only personalize which products are shown, they could personalize the way they're pitched, too.…