Behavioral prediction from unconscious signals requires continuous workplace sensing

Evidence

The goal, the authors said, was to make machines that can “monitor social communication and provide real-time intervention.” To that end, twenty-two office employees were “instrumented” with the badge for one month in order to “automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing feedback to the users of our system.” The research provided credible results, revealing patterns of communication and behavior that the authors concluded “would not be available without the use of a device such as the sociometric badge. Our results… argue strongly for the use of automatic sensing data collection tools to understand social systems.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1350

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the empirical claim at the heart of reality mining: that certain behavioral patterns are only knowable through always-on sensing, not self-report or observation.
• XREF: connects to: Affective computing treats unconscious emotions as measurable behavioral signals. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 888; Microsoft patented preemptive monitoring of user behavior against mental-state prediction models. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1312; Unstructured behavioral signals can reconstruct detailed narratives about each user — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 209

Broader Connections

• Unstructured behavioral signals can reconstruct detailed narratives about each user #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 209