Knowing me, knowing you
- Article 37 of 77
- Information Age, May 2002
Psychological profiling: it works in murder hunts. Can it expose the traits of web site users?
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Psychological profiling is the stuff of serial killer hunts and TV crime dramas. By analysing clues about a murderer's behaviour, criminal psychologists can narrow the search to specific types of individual. But now the techniques of psychological profiling are finding enthusiastic support beyond law enforcement, notably in the field of online retailing. A handful of software companies are developing programs that help companies profile their web site users with a view to targeting them more accurately and more profitably.
“In the traditional world, gathering profile data on individuals is time consuming and expensive,” argues Paul Mitchinson, initiative manager for e-intelligence at analytics software company SAS. “But online, you can automatically record whatever a person does in terms of requests or interactions.” Any web server can log which pages, images, and other files a web browser has requested, as well as details about the individual browsing, at a cost of little more than the price of storing the data. That analysis gives valuable insight into the visitor's behaviour and, indeed, their personality.
“The aim is to learn about a person in more ways and in more depth than anyone else,” says Daniel Brown, CTO of London-based Applied Psychology Research (APR). “That means at some levels capturing some relatively straightforward information about a person, such as what information they are seeking in a typical search enquiry. But it also involves profiling a person when they know the sort of product they want, but haven't decided on a specific item.”
Brown, who started APR using technology he devised while a psychology researcher, says his company's software can make generalisations about people that apply over time and with different levels of confidence. It uses psychological techniques and procedures to build up profiles of people – who, as Brown points out, “can appear more different from themselves than from other people”.
He explains: “One minute you might be searching for information related to work and the next searching for something related to your social life. As a result, you appear at times to be a very different person from your work colleagues.”
Although Brown says that psychological techniques such as the 'Beck Depression Inventory' (a formal questionnaire for determining individuals' level of depression) are not used in the software, more general techniques from the 'State-Trait-Anger Inventory' are used “to monitor both [a visitor's] state of mind at a given time and their traits over a longer term”.
One of the biggest advantages of psychological profiling is that it can be completely anonymous. In contrast, the goal of most traditional online analysis is to tie in the data obtained from the online interaction with that gathered offline (for example, a retailer aligning details obtained from loyalty card applications with subsequent online shopping).
That dual approach leads to privacy issues. “There are two factors in ecommerce: what marketers want and what consumers want,” admits Amanda Chandler, director of data protection for US Internet advertising company DoubleClick. “Marketers think it's a fantastic idea to link [online and offline data], but individuals think the marketers often know too much about them.”
It is also difficult to do. The critical thing with traditional profiling, says APR's Brown, is that you have to have a unique identifier for each person. “The challenge is that most unique identifiers are sadly not so unique. You might have a unique identifier for your supermarket loyalty card but that doesn't actually correlate with your bank details, your petrol purchases or your TV viewing habits. So it's a very limited assimilation of your world view.”
Moreover, most e-tailers only convert 3% to 4% of their visitors into buyers or persuade them to register. That means 95% to 99% are anonymous visitors.
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