Are you a Jif or a Skippy type?
Your answer could determine which political party you align with, according to an unusual study conducted at the University Of Chicago.
The study purported that everything consumers buy or even watch on TV could predict their gender, race, social status and politics with 90% accuracy.
According to research by Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, it turns out that people are separated not just by gu… https://t.co/0Qu8fNr7vX— Chicago Booth News (@Chicago Booth News) 1531247707.0
Economists from the university's Booth School of Business, Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, programmed machines to identify a person's background based on their consumer behavior.
Their findings were released in the National Bureau of Economic Research and covered in a report by The Washington Post .
The duo trained their algorithms to detect patterns in decades of responses to three long-running surveys, each with between 669 and 22,033 responses per year.
The surveys were tuned and filtered to be consistent over time, which allowed Bertrand and Kamenica to measure how America's cultural divides have evolved.
“The researchers found that a person owning an iPhone gave them a 69.1% chance to correctly infer that the owner of… https://t.co/XWHEiD9NjQ— Keith Stoeckeler 🍔 (@Keith Stoeckeler 🍔) 1531140491.0
To accurately demonstrate how cultural factors were influenced by a person's race, education and economic status, Bertrand and Kamenica tested the algorithms on subsets of the data that were foreign to the program.
What a treat to see this paper by Marianne Bertrand & Emir Kamenica. #SocSciResearch They ask: Is cultural dista… https://t.co/Y5VyY2HfeM— Jan Zilinsky (@Jan Zilinsky) 1531343255.0
What magazines people read, what movies they watch, and what products they buy contains some information about peop… https://t.co/m3MdA4wWIm— Jan Zilinsky (@Jan Zilinsky) 1531343491.0
This is important because people are more likely to socialize with people who share the same culture. Interaction… https://t.co/gQAAJf4bEW— Jan Zilinsky (@Jan Zilinsky) 1531343647.0
The study showed the obvious, of course. Like men don't spend as much on mascara as women and, conversely, women don't buy after shave as much as men.
But other results were more revelatory. Like White people and Black people are almost as different in their spending habits as poor people and rich people.
Research from @ChicagoBooth’s Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica (https://t.co/fBc69CscZF) argue that owning an iP… https://t.co/UdJiFdh3Sx— Becker Friedman (@Becker Friedman) 1531434600.0
The top ten TV show predictors for White people included such offerings as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, American Pickers and The Big Bang Theory.
Top ten brand name products included Thomas' English muffins, Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce and Stove Top stuffing.
In 1992, using @thegreypoupon was 62.2% indicative of being high income, by 2016 the fancy mustard was replaced. Ow… https://t.co/JNqcpqgtk4— Chicago Booth News (@Chicago Booth News) 1531234512.0
When it came to predicting liberals, the data became more interesting. The 2009 binary analysis results included examples like 56.2% of liberals bought a novel and 56.8% did not own fishing gear.
When it came to predicting brands, 54.4% of liberals did not purchase Jif peanut butter and 54.4% did not buy meals at the fast food chain Sonic.
Kamenica commented on America's cultural divide, saying that those with higher incomes purchased different products from a demographic with lower incomes and whites and non-whites watched different TV shows.
Interesting paper that I look forward to reading from Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica. A little shocked that th… https://t.co/oygQQVirxp— Morgan C Williams Jr (@Morgan C Williams Jr) 1531175121.0
There are fewer shows like 227 or Martin on the air today and movies like Coming to America, but shows like Game of… https://t.co/ZfLMkINckR— Morgan C Williams Jr (@Morgan C Williams Jr) 1531175571.0
What's really striking to me is how constant cultural divisions have been as the world has changed. This is not a new phenomenon.
For the past 40 years, liberals and conservatives are disagreeing more each year. On every topic, liberals and conservatives are disagreeing more than they used to.
H/T - WashingtonPost, Twitter, Takeout