social media – NICKBAILY.COM

The BBC profiles scientist Delroy Paulhus, a specialist studying why some people have an unusual propensity to be selfish, manipulative, and unkind.

If you had the opportunity to feed harmless bugs into a coffee grinder, would you enjoy the experience? Even if the bugs had names, and you could hear their shells painfully crunching? And would you take a perverse pleasure from blasting an innocent bystander with an excruciating noise?

These are just some of the tests that Delroy Paulhus uses to understand the “dark personalities” around us. Essentially, he wants to answer a question we all may have asked: why do some people take pleasure in cruelty? Not just psychopaths and murderers – but school bullies, internet trolls and even apparently upstanding members of society such as politicians and policemen.

It is easy, he says, to make quick and simplistic assumptions about these people. “We have a tendency to use the halo or devil framing of individuals we meet – we want to simplify our world into good or bad people,” says Paulhus, who is based at the University of British Columbia in Canada. But while Paulhus doesn’t excuse cruelty, his approach has been more detached, like a zoologist studying poisonous insects – allowing him to build a “taxonomy”, as he calls it, of the different flavours of everyday evil.

He turns his eye to a particularly vexing problem for those who create online communities as well:

He thinks this is directly relevant to internet trolls. “They appear to be the internet version of everyday sadists because they spend time searching for people to hurt.” Sure enough, an anonymous survey of trollish commentators found that they scored highly on dark tetrad traits, but particularly the everyday sadism component – and enjoyment was their prime motivation. Indeed, the bug-crushing experiment suggested that everyday sadists may have more muted emotional responses to all kinds of pleasurable activities – so perhaps their random acts of cruelty are attempts to break through the emotional numbness.

Story: Psychology: the man who studies everyday evil

Richard Fergie writing on E-Analytica illustrates perils for marketers when trying to outsmart ad-tech algorithms:

Before Christmas I ran a brand bidding incremental value test for one of my clients. The results showed that nearly all PPC brand traffic was canibalized from organic. We paused the brand campaigns. This is about what happened next.

Mid January, competitor ads on the brand name terms became much more aggressive. We uhmmed and ahhed for a bit because we didn't want to waste money with no direct return but it was also obvious that these competitor ads were causing brand damage. At the end of January the decision was made to re-activate the brand campaigns.

"The undo button doesn't quite work the way you think it does."

For a variety of reasons (very generic brand name, high rolling competitors, other Google subterfuge) this account had always had a high CPC for brand terms (over $1). When we turned the brand adverts on again the CPCs for the brand campaign were the highest in the whole account. This was not good as it was eating our very limited budget.

What happened here is instructive. He had made a decision to run ads against the brand's words (this is the equivalent of running an ad linked to Amazon for people who search for the word "Amazon" in Google), and though it was nominally successful it was apparent that nearly everyone clicking on the ad (and costing money) was someone who would have clicked on the regular organic search results anyways.

So you start out with people Googling your brand name and clicking through to your site for free, and and up with people Googling your brand name and you paying a dollar or more for the same click. Whoops.

The problem came in three stages. First he noticed his competitors were also bidding for the same words, and driving his costs up, and then when he decided to stop paying for those increasingly expensive clicks, he ended up with less traffic than when he started the whole experiment, and was forced to return and pay even higher prices. Spending money and effort to get fewer visitors is not a good way to make an advertising client satisfied.

Thankfully the story has a happy ending:

To figure out what was going on here I made the following assumptions:

For these queries and advertisers, quality score is essentially click through rate.

Google's estimate for our CTR remained unchanged from when the ads last ran.

The estimate for the CTR of the competitor ads has increased since we stopped running brand ads.

This meant that our competitor's ad rank improved because we left the auction. When we returned our CPCs were higher because the actual CPC is the ad rank of the advertiser below divided by your own quality score.

Using this reasoning I predicted that brand CPC would fall as our competitor's CTR reduced now that our ads were back at the head of the auction.

Two weeks later it looks like I was right: the brand CPC is back to where it was.

An important lesson that with a flawed plan, an online marketing campaign is actually capable of causing real harm, beyond just being ineffective or wasteful.