Facebook’s voting experiment proved social pressure can be instrumentally deployed at scale.

Evidence

Pentland finds Facebook’s “contagion” experiments particularly enlightening, seeing all sorts of practical insights in their complexities. For example, in the corporation’s 61-million-person voting experiment, Pentland sees confirmation that social pressure can be effectively instrumentalized in social networks, especially among people with “strong ties”: “The knowledge that our face-to-face friends had already voted generated enough social pressure that it convinced people to vote.” … With this knowledge and more like it, Pentland’s “we,” the tuners, will be able to activate the “right incentives.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1388

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Facebook 61-million-person voting experiment, widely reported (e.g., 2012 Nature study), and to behavioral contagion research generally. — connects to: Facebook ran a 61-million-user experiment on political mobilization in 2010 — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 935; Facebook’s manipulated social messages produced 340,000 additional votes in 2010 — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 938; Showing friends’ faces boosted Facebook voting message effectiveness by 2 percent — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 937
• QUESTION: Pentland treats the contagion experiments as practically useful; worth chasing how far empathy/attachment manipulation is claimed to reach.