Understanding at Tempo
Join the discussion or just get in touch
A State of Mind
Cognition - its all in the mind
The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses is defined as cognition. We define it as the mental processes associated with the acquisition and storage of information, as well as how that information is then used to guide your behaviour. In essence, it is the ability to perceive and react, process, and comprehend, store and retrieve information, make decisions, and respond appropriately. The modern word 'cognition' derives from the Latin word 'cognoscere,' which means 'to learn.' Keeping this in mind, cognitive functioning is critical for daily life, governing our thoughts and actions.
Cognition is a dynamic process that adapts to new information and regulates our behaviour throughout our lives, and it is influenced by both hereditary and environmental variables. The ability to measure and monitor cognition has the potential to allow us to judge how our ability to perceive and react, make decisions, and respond appropriately, has been affected by media and other influences.
Changing Perception - Affecting the Emotional State
Emotional states can be conveyed to others via emotional contagion, resulting to people experiencing the same emotions without their knowledge, according to a large-scale experiment on Facebook (N = 689,003). The experiment showed that emotional contagion can happen even when there is no direct interaction between people (just seeing a buddy express an emotion is enough) and when there are no nonverbal indicators.
Emotional contagion allows people to pass on their feelings to others, causing them to experience the same emotions as those around them. In laboratory trials, people transfer happy and negative moods and feelings to others, which is known as emotional contagion. Similarly, evidence collected over a 20-year period from a large, real-world social network suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transmitted across networks as well.
By limiting the amount of emotional information in the News Feed, users who use Facebook were tested to see if emotional contagion happens outside of in-person interaction between individuals. People created fewer positive posts and more negative posts when positive terms were lowered; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern happened. These findings suggest that emotions expressed by others on Facebook have an impact on our own emotions, providing experimental evidence for large-scale social network contagion.
This experiment, conducted in 2014, confirmed for the first time that social manipulation can occur through social media platforms and without the need for in-person interaction.
Targeted Capability - Psychographics
In September 2016, Alexander Nix, the C.E.O. of Cambridge Analytica, the data, and messaging agency that was working with Donald Trump's allegedly supporting Presidential campaign at the time, defined his company's work as follows: “If you know the personality of the people you’re targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively with those key audience groups.” The fancy term for this is psychographic targeting.
The study of people based on their activities, interests, and opinions is known as psychographics. It goes beyond categorising people based on basic demographic information like age, gender, or race. Psychographics is the study of the psychological aspects that influence behaviour. This encompasses emotional responses and motivations, as well as natural attitudes, biases, and prejudices, as well as moral, ethical, and political ideals.
In 2016, Trump went on to win the presidency against all odds and expectations a few weeks later, leaving political operatives and journalists seeking for answers. Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica's former business-development director, told the Guardian, "There was a great demand internally for people to understand how we did it. Everyone was curious: old clients, potential clients."
Because the Cambridge Analytica’s track record is spotty and psychographic targeting in political campaigns was a relatively new concept, it has yet to be proven that Cambridge Analytica’s successfully used these methods on behalf of Trump's campaign. The question of whether Cambridge Analytica's targeting work swayed the election outcome has been a source of debate since then.
Psychographics – The Narrative War
Clausewitz states “Thus, war is an act of violence in order to force our will upon the enemy.” By extension, war is the act of suppressing or changing the target audiences will and affecting their perceptions. As, Clausewitz states, traditionally this change has been caused using force to generate fear or compliance. However, as the 2014 Facebook experiment demonstrated, it is possible to affect the cognition of the target audience through emotional contagion. And if psychographics can be used to manipulate populations, the narrative war becomes dominant in the competitive mission-space. As David Patrikarakos said in his book, “War in a 140 Characters”, “I began to understand that I was caught up in two wars: one fought on the ground with tanks and artillery, and an information war fought largely, though not exclusively, through social media. And, perhaps counter-intuitively, it mattered who won the war of words and narratives (rather) than who had the most potent weaponry.”
The Operational End State – A State of Mind
The purpose of war is to impose our will on the enemy. The will of an opponent exists in the cognitive domain, in the opponents ability to perceive and react, process, and comprehend, store and retrieve information, make decisions, and respond appropriately. Militaries use force to affect this domain by creating fear or compliance through threat of violence. However, unless the cognitive domain can be monitored and measured, the desired cognitive shift cannot be assessed, and so, a conflict can never really be won.
360iSR have been teaching 3 domain ISR operations for over 4 years. We help clients explore how best to measure operational effect by mapping tactical results to operational end state. Without this capability, western militaries will continue to suffer at the hands of narratives intended to undermine public opinion, as without this capability a military can never truly know where they are on the operational line; whether the effects they are creating are positive or negatively impacting progress.
Come and talk to us about this critical capability. Come and talk to an integrated operational support company that doesn't just teach the book, they write the book.
Contact Us
