The new book Mindmasters teaches how the digital “breadcrumbs” we leave behind enable algorithms to decode our psychology and use that information to influence our decisions. The author presents a vision for using this power for good while thwarting the current ability of powerful organizations to take advantage of our information for their own gain without our permission.
Dr. Sandra Matz, the author of Mindmasters is a young professor at Columbia University. According to her LinkedIn profile, her research “aims to understand how psychological characteristics influence real-life outcomes in a number of business-related domains (e.g. financial well-being, consumer satisfaction or team performance), with the goal of helping businesses and individuals to make better decisions.” From reading Mindmasters, I get a distinct sense that Dr. Matz and I have very little in common — and yet the concerns that she raises in Mindmasters are likely to be shared by many — independent of values, political perspectives, religious background, etc.
She probably could write a best selling book that would help companies leverage the evidence we leave behind to understand our psychology and therefore manipulate us to choose their products. This isn’t that book. If anything, this is the opposite of that book. Mindmasters is a thought leadership book that presents a future vision that puts individuals in control of their digital privacy while still enabling the kinds of positive contributions to society and our daily lives that we have seen over the past several decades and that we hope to see in the future.
While I’m not completely convinced that the vision is achievable, the author presents a glimmer of hope. This book is educational but does not pretend to provide any practical advice to business leaders, so I cannot recommend it to most of my readers. However, if you want to better understand more about how our digital breadcrumbs can enable powerful organizations to “get inside our heads” as we make decisions online, then Mindmasters may be a great place to start. Especially if you are passionate about shaping a more privacy-centric future, you will want to read Mindmasters.