Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion

^aColumbia Business School, Columbia University, New York City, NY 10027;
^bGraduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305;
^cWharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104;
^dCambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, United Kingdom

Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved October 17, 2017 (received for review June 17, 2017)

Footnotes

↵¹To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: sm4409{at}gsb.columbia.edu.
↵²M.K. and D.J.S. contributed equally to this work.

Author contributions: S.C.M. and M.K. designed research; S.C.M., M.K., and D.J.S. performed research; S.C.M. analyzed data; and S.C.M., M.K., G.N., and D.J.S. wrote the paper.
Conflict of interest statement: D.J.S. received revenue as the owner of the myPersonality Facebook application until it was discontinued in 2012. Revenue was received from displaying ads within the application and charging for a premium personality test. The revenue received by D.J.S. was unrelated to the studies presented in this paper, and there will be no future revenue generated from the application. None of the authors received any compensation for working on the marketing campaigns used to collect data for the studies presented in this manuscript.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data reported in this paper have been deposited in the Open Science Framework (OSF), https://osf.io/srjv7/?view_only=90316b0c2e06420bbc3a1cc857a9e3c7.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1710966114/-/DCSupplemental.