New Book! Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods

Manipulating fellow-feeling

We are now, sadly, getting used to the hijacking of collective emotions for unethical and undemocratic ends. January 8th 2023 saw the unscrupulous manipulation of fellow-feeling in the Brazilian presidential election, with pro-Bolsonaro supporters provoked into attempting an insurrection. This, in turn, was a replay of events in the last US presidential election, where President Donald Trump propagated false claims of rigged elections, undermining trust in the democratic system.

Not confined to politics, emotional, but false, claims about all sorts of issues affecting the civic body now flow freely through global media systems, especially social media platforms. As the bandwidth for emotion capture expands with the introduction of biometric emotion recognition systems across many walks of life across the world, the potential for emotional manipulation based on falsehoods is, likewise, vast.

Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods

A new open access, interdisciplinary book from Professor Vian Bakir and Professor Andrew McStay – Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods - is a global examination of false information, a conceptualisation of what recent years signify, and a diagnosis of what we should do about it, and what’s coming next. With mounting evidence that emotion profiling incubates disinformation and misinformation online, causing significant harms worldwide, the book considers near horizon scenarios that exploit the automated industrial psycho-physiological profiling of the civic body to understand affect and infer emotion for the purposes of changing behaviour. These include The Ministry of Optimised Moods; Campaigns that Optimise Embodied Emotions; and Profiting from Optimising Fellow-Feeling.

This book is likely to be of interest to those working in policy and technology, multiple disciplines, and anyone with a general interest in protecting the ‘global civic body’ from the onslaught of targeted, false information that emotion profiling enables. The book flows from the professors’ Economic and Social Research Council grant on Emotional AI in Cities: Cross Cultural Lessons from UK and Japan on Designing for An Ethical Life.