The Happiness Industry (25 page)

The reduction of social life to psychology, as performed by Jacob Moreno and behavioural economists, or to physiology as achieved by social neuroscience, is not necessarily irreversible either. Karl Marx believed that by bringing workers together in the factory and forcing them to work together, capitalism was creating the very class formation that would eventually overwhelm it. This was despite the ‘bourgeois ideology' which stressed the primacy of individuals transacting in a marketplace. Similarly, individuals today may be brought together for their own mental and physical health, or for their own private hedonistic kicks; but social congregations can develop their own logic, which is not reducible to that of individual well-being or pleasure. This is the hope that currently lies dormant in this new, neoliberal socialism.

Business ideas and practices do not simply spread of their own accord, not even when they appear to yield clear profits. They need pushing. Sometimes they need cultural and political barriers to be forcefully broken down before they are later adopted, until eventually they come to appear entirely natural. The idea of ‘scientific advertising', pioneered in the 1920s by the firm James Walter Thompson (JWT), with support from John B. Watson, is a case in point.

JWT were the first of the large Madison Avenue firms to believe that advertising could target consumers scientifically thanks to psychological profiling techniques, such as surveys. They believed individuals could be influenced through such techniques to make purchases, even against their own better rationality. Today, the notion that advertising relies on detailed psychological insights into our intimate emotions and behaviours seems quite obvious. But its journey from Madison Avenue in the mid 1920s to the status of global common sense was not straight-forward.

JWT would not have succeeded in exporting scientific advertising around the world had it not been for the contract they won with General Motors (GM) in 1927.
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By this time GM already
had a powerful international presence, with production plants scattered across Europe. The deal that JWT struck with GM was that they would open an office in every country where GM was already located, so as to furnish the car giant with local marketing expertise. In return GM would grant JWT an exclusive account for all of its markets around the world. In 1927 alone, JWT opened offices in six European countries. Over the next four years, it would open further offices in India, South Africa, Australia, Canada and Japan. Thanks to the security offered by its corporate behemoth of a patron, JWT became an international player, and its particular style of marketing expertise went global. The capacity of US businesses to export to global markets, which surged after World War Two, was greatly aided by the fact that such networks of business intelligence had already permeated much of the capitalist world. Knowledge of foreign consumers was already on hand.

Following the acquisition of the GM contract, JWT set about accumulating consumer insight on an unprecedented scale. In less than eighteen months, over 44,000 interviews were done around the world, many in relation to cars, but also on topics such as food and toiletry consumption.
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This was the most ambitious project of mass psychological profiling ever attempted. A detailed map of global consumer tastes was being built up from scratch. And yet this was not achieved without encountering some resistance.

JWT researchers quickly discovered that their techniques were not widely understood or appreciated beyond their home market. The level of consumer intimacy that they were seeking was often simply refused. In Britain, several researchers were arrested for conducting door-to-door surveys.
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Another British interviewer found the job of consumer profiling so difficult that
he was reduced to chasing people down the street shouting questions at them. A researcher conducting surveys in flats in Copenhagen in 1927 was met with such hostility that one resident threw him down a flight of stairs. And another, also in Copenhagen, was arrested for trying to get into people's homes by impersonating an inspection officer. The German Automobile Manufacturer's Association threatened to sue JWT for ‘business espionage'.

The globalization of consumer intelligence required a combination of luck, guile and brute force. The challenge that JWT had set itself was deeply problematic. It wasn't simply to observe people in public or invite public opinions, as magazines had been doing for some time. It was to acquire a new level of intimacy with the consumer, which often meant observing the housewife in her home. Researchers didn't only want to know what these people thought or said about certain products, they also wanted to see the products in the home, watch how the consumer behaved. This knowledge could only be acquired through a degree of snooping around and asking somewhat personal questions.

The story of JWT's painful arrival in Europe points towards one of the gravest challenges that confronts the project of mass psychological measurement: how does one get ordinary people to cooperate? There is a political dimension to any social science, whereby the researcher must either negotiate with their research subjects in the hope of winning their consent, or else they must use some degree of force and privilege to oblige people to be studied and measured. Either that, or they operate in a more clandestine fashion.

When Wilhelm Wundt established his psychology laboratory in Leipzig, he used his own students and assistants as the focus of
his experiments. Their full consent was deemed necessary for the type of science he was seeking to carry out. More commonly today, psychologists offer monetary incentives to their research subjects, who are typically hard-up students from other disciplines. For a counter-example, consider the history of statistics, which (as the word indicates) has always been intimately entangled with the violent power of states in order to ensure that the population is measured accurately and objectively. States are able to do what JWT initially struggled to do in observing people en masse. Similarly, Frederick Taylor was dependent on his aristocratic connections in order to peer inside numerous Philadelphia workplaces during the 1870s and 1880s.

The term ‘data' derives from the Latin,
datum
, which literally means ‘that which is given'. It is often an outrageous lie. The data gathered by surveys and psychological experiments is scarcely ever just given. It is either seized through force of surveillance, thanks to some power inequality, or it is given in exchange for something else, such as a monetary reward or a chance to win a free iPad. Often, it is collected in a clandestine way, like the one-way mirrors through which focus groups are observed. In social sciences such as anthropology, the terms on which data is gained (in that case, through prolonged observation and participation) are a matter of constant reflection. But in the behavioural sciences, the innocent term ‘data' usefully conceals a huge apparatus of power through which people can be studied, watched, measured and traced, with or without their consent.

Evidently, this political dimension was still visible in the 1920s, when JWT were expanding oversees. In the years since, however, it has receded from view. Questions of what people think or feel, how they intend to vote, how they perceive certain brands,
have become simple matters of fact. This is no less true of happiness. Gallup now surveys one thousand American adults on their happiness and well-being every single day, allowing them to trace public mood in great detail, from one day to the next. We are now so familiar with the idea that powerful institutions want to know what we're feeling and thinking that it no longer appears as a political issue. But possibilities for psychological and behavioural data are heavily shaped by the power structures which facilitate them. The current explosion in happiness and well-being data is really an effect of new technologies and practices of surveillance. In turn, these depend on pre-existing power inequalities.

Building the new laboratory

In 2012, Harvard Business Review declared that ‘data scientist' would be the ‘sexiest job of the twenty-first century'.
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We live during a time of tremendous optimism regarding the possibilities for data collection and analysis that is refuelling the behaviourist and utilitarian ambition to manage society purely through careful scientific observation of mind, body and brain. Whenever a behavioural economist or happiness guru stands up and declares that finally we can access the secrets of human motivation and satisfaction, they are implicitly referring to a number of technological and cultural changes which have transformed opportunities for psychological surveillance. Three in particular are worth highlighting.

Firstly, there is the much-celebrated rise of ‘big data'.
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As our various everyday transactions with retailers, health-care providers, the urban environment, governments and each other
become digitized, so they produce vast archival records that can be ‘mined' with sufficient technological capability. Much of this data is viewed as a prized possession by the companies that acquire it, who believe that it holds untold riches for those wanting to predict how people will behave in future. Many, such as Facebook, are inclined to keep it private, such that they can conduct analysis of it for their own purposes, or sell it on to market research companies.

In other circumstances, this data is being ‘opened up' on the basis that it is a public good. After all, we the public created it by swiping our smart cards, visiting websites, tweeting our thoughts, and so on. Big data should therefore be something available to all of us to analyse. What this more liberal approach tends to ignore is the fact that, even where data is being opened up, the tools to analyse it are not. As the ‘smart cities' analyst Anthony Townsend has pointed out with regard to New York City's open data regulations, they judiciously leave out the algorithms which are used by e-government contractors to analyse the data.
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While the liberal left continues to worry about the privatization of knowledge as enacted by intellectual property rights, a new problem of the privatization of theory has arisen, whereby algorithms which spot patterns and trends are shrouded in commercial secrecy. Entire businesses are now built on the capacity to interpret and make connections within big data.

The second development is one that can only be truly understood in cultural terms. To put it simply, the spread of narcissism has been harnessed as research opportunity. When JWT first sought to profile European consumers in the 1920s, this was experienced as an invasion of privacy, as indeed it was. More recently, tolerance for surveys has fallen all over again, though more out of impatience on the part of potential participants than
anything else.
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People simply cannot be bothered to share details of what they like, think or want with researchers holding clipboards any more. But when Facebook asks its one billion users that faux-innocent question ‘What's on your mind?', we pour our thoughts, tastes, likes, desires and opinions into the company's massive databank without a further thought.

When obliged to report on their inner mental states for research purposes, people do so only grudgingly. But when doing so of their own volition, suddenly reporting on behaviour and moods becomes a fulfilling, satisfying activity in its own right. The ‘quantified self' movement, in which individuals measure and report on various aspects of their private lives – from their diets, to their moods, to their sex lives – began as an experimental group of software developers and artists. But it unearthed a surprising enthusiasm for self-surveillance that market researchers and behavioural scientists have carefully noted. Companies such as Nike are now exploring ways in which health and fitness products can be sold alongside quantified self apps, which will allow individuals to make constant reports of their behaviour (such as jogging), generating new data sets for the company in the process.

There is a third development, the political and philosophical implications of which are potentially the most radical of all. This concerns the capability to ‘teach' computers how to interpret human behaviour in terms of the emotions that are conveyed. For example, the field of ‘sentiment analysis' involves the design of algorithms to interpret the sentiment that is expressed in a given sentence, for example, a single tweet. The MIT Affective Computing research centre is dedicated to exploring new ways in which computers might read people's moods through evaluating their facial expressions, or might carry out ‘emotionally
intelligent' conversations with people, to provide them with therapeutic support or friendship.

Ways of reading an individual's mood, through tracking his body, face and behaviour, are now expanding rapidly. Computer programmes designed to influence our feelings, once they have been gauged, are another way in which emotions and technology are becoming synched with each other. Already, computerized cognitive behavioural therapy is available thanks to software packages such as Beating the Blues and FearFighter. As affective computing advances, the capabilities of computers to judge and influence our feelings will grow.

Facial scanning technologies hold out great promise for marketers and advertisers wanting to acquire an ‘objective' grasp of human emotion. These are beginning to move beyond the limited realms of computing or psychology labs and permeate day-to-day life. The supermarket chain Tesco has already trialled technologies which advertise different products at different individuals, depending on what moods their faces are communicating.
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Cameras can be used to recognize the faces of unique consumers in the street and market products at them based on their previous shopping behaviours.
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But this may be just the beginning. One of the leading developers of face-reading software has piloted the technology in classrooms, to identify whether a student is bored or focused.
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The combination of big data, the narcissistic sharing of private feelings and thoughts, and more emotionally intelligent computers opens up possibilities for psychological tracking that Bentham and Watson could never have dreamed of. Add in smartphones and you have an extraordinary apparatus of data gathering, the like of which was previously only plausible within university laboratories or particularly high-surveillance
institutions such as prisons. The political, technological and cultural limits to psychological surveillance are dissolving. The great virtue of the market, for neoliberals such as the Chicago School, was that it acted as a constant survey of consumer preferences which extended across society. But mass digitization and data analytics now offer a rival mode of psychological audit that potentially extends even further, engulfing personal relations and feelings which markets do not ordinarily reach.