ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Quantifying the potential persuasive returns to political microtargeting.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4.Nature human behaviour · 2025Trial
- Article
- The Complexities of AI for Social Good: An Explorative Study on Adversarial Machine Learning to Facilitate Deliberative Decision-Making in Elections.Science and engineering ethics · 2026Article
- Targeted digital voter suppression efforts likely decrease voter turnout.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Empowering AI assisted clinical drug development: tactics to address data bias, the digital divide and missing patient populations through AI and digital solutions.Frontiers in digital health · 2026Review
- The impact of advanced AI systems on democracy.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- LLM-generated messages can persuade humans on policy issues.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation in intergenerational cooperation.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Testing theories of political persuasion using AI.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Politically-targeted intergroup interventions promote social equality and engagement.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The role of social media ads for election outcomes: Evidence from the 2021 German election.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Short-term exposure to filter-bubble recommendation systems has limited polarization effects: Naturalistic experiments on YouTube.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Warning people that they are being microtargeted fails to eliminate persuasive advantage.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Investigating the role of source and source trust in prebunks and debunks of misinformation in online experiments across four EU countries.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Systematic discrepancies in the delivery of political ads on Facebook and Instagram.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Evaluating the persuasive influence of political microtargeting with large language models.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The differential impact of climate interventions along the political divide in 60 countries.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The distorting effects of producer strategies: Why engagement does not reveal consumer preferences for misinformation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The potential of generative AI for personalized persuasion at scale.Scientific reports · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Much concern has been raised about the power of political microtargeting to sway voters' opinions, influence elections, and undermine democracy. Yet little research has directly estimated the persuasive advantage of microtargeting over alternative campaign strategies. Here, we do so using two studies focused on U.S. policy issue advertising. To implement a microtargeting strategy, we combined machine learning with message pretesting to determine which advertisements to show to which individuals to maximize persuasive impact. Using survey experiments, we then compared the performance of this microtargeting strategy against two other messaging strategies. Overall, we estimate that our microtargeting strategy outperformed these strategies by an average of 70% or more in a context where all of the messages aimed to influence the same policy attitude (Study 1). Notably, however, we found no evidence that targeting messages by more than one covariate yielded additional persuasive gains, and the performance advantage of microtargeting was primarily visible for one of the two policy issues under study. Moreover, when microtargeting was used instead to identify which policy attitudes to target with messaging (Study 2), its advantage was more limited. Taken together, these results suggest that the use of microtargeting-combining message pretesting with machine learning-can potentially increase campaigns' persuasive influence and may not require the collection of vast amounts of personal data to uncover complex interactions between audience characteristics and political messaging. However, the extent to which this approach confers a persuasive advantage over alternative strategies likely depends heavily on context.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.