PRIZM’s cluster profiles linked consumption habits directly to party voting patterns

Evidence

As an early guide to the clusters prepared in the 1980s explains, those who lived in “Young Influential” neighborhoods were the “young, upwardly mobile singles and dual career couples”; mostly they were to be “found in the inner-ring suburb of major cities.” As to priorities: they “don’t care about good schools, because they don’t have children.” Rather, “they want a mall with a sushi bar, gourmet cookie shop, travel agency and a psychotherapy center.” They read books at twice the rate of the national average, and they tended to vote Republican. By contrast, Claritas found that those living in the “Bohemian Mix” areas, like New York’s Greenwich Village, were “an eclectic melange of never-married and divorced singles, young Turks and older professionals, blacks and whites” who held “benefit dances for the Sandinistas.” “Squash, racquetball and jogging” were among their typical pastimes. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 607

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘Young Influential’ cluster wanting a mall with sushi bar, gourmet cookie shop, travel agency and psychotherapy center is a fun period snapshot.
• XREF: Shows the direct ancestry of modern psychographic and partisan data targeting that dominates political and platform ad markets today. — connects to: The 2012 Obama campaign applied behavioral surplus prediction directly to voter targeting — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 395; PRIZM reimagined America as repeating lifestyle-neighborhood clusters rather than states — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 608; Fromm aimed to map social-psychological character types onto political party groupings — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 697 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Cluster analysis grouped neighborhoods by demographic and lifestyle similarity of residents. #expands (0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 601
• PRIZM reimagined America as repeating lifestyle-neighborhood clusters rather than states #expands (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 608
• Fromm aimed to map social-psychological character types onto political party groupings #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 697