Keen On

Is there really a data-driven science that enables us to predict and change human behavior?Mind Masters author and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz certainly is a believer. But I wonder whether Matz’s observations about psychological targeting and data analysis through large language models represent anything fundamentally new or original. I’m also not convinced of her glib take on mental health applications. In contrast with Matz, I fear that AI-driven mental health monitoring could exacerbate rather than solve existing cultural problems. My advice: don’t trust people who call themselves “data scientists”. The data lies as much as humans. It’s how we use and abuse it that matters.Sandra Matz is the David W. Zalaznick Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School in New York. As a computational social scientist, she studies human behavior and preferences using a combination of Big Data analytics and traditional experimental methods. Her research aims to understand how psychological