Transcript
Dave Stahoviak (0:00)
Algorithms are becoming more influential with every passing day. That's why leaders must understand their power and then decide how their organizations engage. In this episode, where psychological targeting is at, where it's going, and the opportunity you have to make the world a bit better, this is Coaching for Leaders, episode 718, produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. So much is changing about how we work and how we utilize technology. We've seen so much in the news in recent years on how organizations are using data and targeting in order to influence behavior. Today, a conversation that helps open the door for all of us to get better about what's happening and more importantly, how we as leaders can do a better job at making choices in our organizations that really create the world that we want. And I am so pleased to welcome Sandra Motz to the show. She is a Columbia Business School professor, computational social scientist, and pioneering expert in psychological targeting. Her research uncovers the hidden relationships between our digital lives and our psychology with the goal of helping businesses and individuals make better decisions. She is the author of Mind the Data Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior. Sandra, what a pleasure to have you on.
Sandra Motz (1:50)
Thank you so much for having me.
Dave Stahoviak (1:52)
Dave, you write in the book about your experience of growing up in a small town in Germany. And as anyone who's lived in a small town knows, everyone knows your stuff, right? And there are some really great benefits that come from that. And there's also some real downsides, too, aren't there?
Sandra Motz (2:15)
Very much so. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. I grew up in this tiny village, 500 people in the southwest corner of Germany. Or actually, as my. As my parents keep reminding me, it's grown to a thousand since I left, which I can assure you is not making that much of a difference. But you're absolutely right. I think the feeling that I got growing up in this village, especially in contrast to me living in New York today, is that there's people who truly know you, right? So it's not just people who live next door. You see them once in a while. You maybe say hi once or twice a day. Those are people who observe everything that you do. They know exactly what you do on the weekend. They know who you're dating. They know which music preferences you have. And for me, what it felt like was that they truly knew me. So they, in a way, put together these, these puzzle pieces of my existence to understand my motivations, my preferences, my fears, hopes, dreams, you name it. And then they did what village neighbors, in a way, do best. Right? So sometimes they used it to offer me the most amazing advice because they knew exactly what I wanted, Right. They kind of helped me figure out what I wanted to do after school and take a gap year, what to study, connect me with opportunities. But on the other hand, it also felt like there was someone pulling the strings behind my back in a ways that I didn't always appreciate. So you're absolutely right in that this idea that someone could really understand what I wanted and who I was had both, like these bright and dark sides to it.
