Misreading Loneliness

It is 2021 and the U.S. is in the grip of a national lockdown. Conventional wisdom shared by many is that the largest social behavior to emerge is “loneliness.” A national market research company used conventional polling tools and determined that an advertising campaign focusing on a “BBQ with close friends” would trigger positive associations for consumers by encouraging them to overcome their loneliness through connection and community.

The campaign didn’t affect consumers in the expected way. Caucasian consumers reacted as expected, but black consumers did not. They had an extremely negative and fearful reaction. Veriphix using Belief3, its ethical AI technology, was able to determine why. Why would an approach based upon traditional polling and survey tools not surface this important difference?

Belief3 goes behind the opinion and the answers individuals offer in a poll, surfacing the unspoken bias and attributes that drive behavior. To learn why the campaign didn’t have the expected positive effects on black consumers, Veriphix applied Belief3 in a specific community – New York City – because of its diversity and variation of economic circumstances that cut across racial lines. The resulting outcomes surfaced some very important distinctions in the experiences of white and black consumers during the lockdown. The differences explained why a message of a BBQ with friends could be so attractive to one group and so unsettling to another.

Belief3 surfaced that the lockdown had affected Caucasian and black consumers very differently. They viewed connection differently. As a group Caucasian consumers benefitted from easier access to video conferencing technologies and had maintained more regular connection with their circle of relationships, when compared to black consumers. The “digital divide” was real and was leading to very different levels of connection for these two groups.

Belief3 also surfaced a second, and less reported phenomenon. Black consumers associate community much more deeply with family than friends. Caucasian consumers tend to view family and friend connections more equally. For the black consumer a BBQ with friends increased loneliness because it was a BBQ without family. It also surfaced a subtext of fear, because a BBQ with strangers was perceived of carrying a larger risk of COVID infection.

Belief3 provided an answer that conventional polls could not. In an ethical and nonintrusive way, it was able to identify biases and drivers of behavior that made a message that appeared positive have a decidedly different effect. And, Belief3 showed why.

It also showed a pathway for a message that would have been perceived a positive by both groups: a BBQ with family. A simple change perhaps, but one that would have been possible only if the right data was available for the decision to be made. Data that only Belief3 could provide.