Our guest this week, Sandra Matz PhD exposes the truth behind our online presence. In our conversation, Sandra reveals that with simple analytics, the digital footprints we leave behind online (our Facebook Likes, our credit card transactions, our Google Map searches) add up to paint a very revealing picture of our personality and state of mind.

Sandra Matz PhD is an associate professor at Columbia Business School. She takes a Big Data approach to studying human behaviour. Her methodologies use psychology, computer science and data collection to explore the relationships between people’s psychological characteristics and their digital footprints. 

Sandra’s work has been published in top-tier journals such as Psychological Science and the American Psychologist, and has attracted worldwide media attention from outlets like the Independent, the BBC, CNBC, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the World Economic Forum.

Our discussion delves into Sandra’s experience around social media profiles, digital ethics, data privacy and our understanding of informed consent. As always we find out about our guest’s musical taste but this week we even find out what our musical preferences can reveal about our personality and social identities. 

We hope you enjoy our discussion with Sandra Matz PhD, and if you do, please leave us a quick review or join our Patreon team at https://www.patreon.com/behavioralgrooves.

Topics

3:04 Welcome to Sandra Matz PhD and speed round questions

4:52 Discussion about Sandra Matz’s Research

52:32 Grooving Session

1:10:37 Bonus Track with Kurt

Links

Sandra Matz https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/cbs-directory/detail/sm4409 

Cambridge Analytica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

Cass Sunstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein 

GDPR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation 

Kate Crawford, NYU https://ainowinstitute.org/about.html 

Helen Nissenbaum, Cornell https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/ 

Tory Higgins, Shared Reality: What Makes Us Strong and Tears Us Apart https://amzn.to/3aywWdW 

SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/ 

Brene Brown https://brenebrown.com/ 

Steve Bannon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon 

Patreon https://www.patreon.com/behavioralgrooves

Behavioral Grooves @behavioralgroov https://twitter.com/behavioralgroov 

Kurt @motivationguru https://twitter.com/motivationguru 

Tim @THoulihan https://twitter.com/THoulihan 

Mary @BeSciMary https://twitter.com/BeSciMary

Musical Links

Taylor Swift https://www.youtube.com/user/taylorswift 

Justin Bieber https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIwFjwMjI0y7PDBVEO9-bkQ 

Bob Dylan https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnRI0ay61tY-fKYzzB3fCnw 

Britney Spears https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-u5WLJ9Yk4 

Coldplay https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDPM_n1atn2ijUwHd0NNRQw 

ACDC https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB0JSO6d5ysH2Mmqz5I9rIw 

Lady Gaga https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNL1ZadSjHpjm4q9j2sVtOA