Psychographic Targeting examined the efficacy of psychopgraphic targeting and marketing in the context of political campaigns. The research is ‘proof of concept’ based and explores authoritarianism, motivated reasoning and targeting in relation to support for communication surveillance.

Presentation Slides and Video (of preliminary findings):

“Rage Against the Weaponized A.I. Propaganda Machine” presented at DEF CON 25, July 28th 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.  Abstract | Slides | Video

Personality and psychological biases in the EU “Brexit” Referendum  is an OPF research project that examined the differences between voters intending to vote ‘Remain’ versus voters who intend to vote ‘Leave’ in the 2016 UK’s referendum on its EU membership, and the extent to which these biases and traits could be targeted and manipulated online.

In July 2018 OPF released a working paper; a technical summary of the results is available here.

Predicting Susceptibility to Social Bots on Twitter examined whether personality traits and Twitter activity played a role in a Twitter users likelihood to interact with an automated bot.

Presentation slides with notes from Black Hat 2013 and DEF CON 21.

Paper: Machine Prediction of Personality from Facebook Profiles, 13th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, 2012

The OPF Big 5 Twitter Experiment looked at how well anti-social personality traits can be discovered using a linguistic analysis of Tweets.

The results show that while we may be careful about the content we post on Twitter, the words we use may reveal more about our personalities than we might wish.

Paper and Presentation Slides: ‘Predicting Dark Triad Personality Traits from Twitter usage and a linguistic analysis of Tweets’, Dec 2012
Paper: ‘Using Twitter Content to Predict Psychopathy’, Dec 2012
Blog Post: Are you what you Tweet?

For further information on this study, click here.