James Herndon
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James Neil Herndon (born May 16, 1952 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) is a Media Psychologist. He is most noted for his controversal [1] behavior-forecasting tool, Affective Encryption Analysis, which, to date, has been utilized as a predictive technique in studies of US Presidential politics and cultural patterns of anti-Semitism. His media philosophy includes elements described as both reactionary and radical.
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[edit] Education and Career
He has an undergraduate degree in Psychology and a Ph.D. in Educational Technology from Arizona State University.[2] He is a member of the American Psychological Association. Professionally, he is a media practitioner, engaged in media design and development, with a focus on the fields of politics and entertainment. Recent projects involve the emerging convergence of television and the Internet, with the goal of optimizing dot-TV website functionality. He continues work on the development of a qualitative and naturalistic research technique he calls Affective Encryption Analysis. He has authored two books on depression, which he considers “an entirely media-driven phenomenon” and is preparing a monograph on Affective Encryption Analysis.[3] His company is Media Psychology Affiliates. He resides in Coburg, Germany.
[edit] Media and Research Philosophy
His definition of Media Psychology as “the use of research-based media to change behavior” [4] has led to his being called “Orwellian.” [5] He justifies his view as “simply the practical objective of all media, which, by nature, attempt, in some manner, to directly alter feeling-states and their behavioral outcomes."[6] Thus, he finds mass media in general incapable of true objectivity, but, instead, “pledged to subjective agendas of influence.”[7]
Increasingly, he rejects traditional quantitative, statistics-centered approaches to media (and other social science) research, which he describes as “suffering from a deadly epidemic of uselessness,” due to an “endemic lack of actionable data.”[8] He describes experimental social science research as “typically divorced from reality in both task and setting, bedeviled with countless confounded variables, and statistically meaningless.”[9]
For him, viewing human behavior “through the eyes of statistical means and probabilities is a comforting, but misguided, illusion, inasmuch as world history is written almost entirely in the actions and words of statistically improbable personalities.”[10] Thus, he encourages media research to redirect more of its efforts in search of “feeling-trends,” which have a historical tendency to emerge in support of powerful individuals, who function as “action-agents.”[11]
He believes that the future of social science research lies in naturalistic research designs and qualitative analysis, with the charge that “the massive, decades-long application of the quantitative research tools of hard-science to human behavior has produced shockingly little results...it’s simply time to wake-up and change direction.”[12]
He believes that feelings are the core phenomenon of human psychology. “It is our feelings that not only drive our behavior, but change our behavior. Therefore, the prime task of media is to manage feelings. There’s nothing devious or Orwellian about this. It’s just the inherent nature of media and of the media business.”[13]
His more radical pronouncements concern the use of media in politics. He charges corporate mass media with “deliberately disabling the ballot box as an instrument of meaningful social change. Using different brand names for exactly the same product is not a choice. It’s fascism rebranded as democracy. Ultimately, politicians are elected by corporations, not by voters.”[14]
He characterizes today’s social conditions as “the golden age of slavery,”[15] escape from which is only possible through a “primitive, anarchical, community-based media revolution.”[16] He believes the Internet is “doomed to a future of corporate censorship indistinguishable from the state-worshiping fascism of today’s network and cable television.”[17]
He calls himself, and other media professionals, “more part of the problem than part of the solution, basically because we have decided that money is more important than freedom. Developing the courage to break-through this barrier is the ultimate challenge for any media professional.”[18]
[edit] Affective Encryption Analysis
The development of Affective Encryption Analysis was heavily influenced by the cosmological theories of William James Sidis, who postulated that we live in a “reversible universe.”[19] Herndon argues that human psychological history is, likewise, reversible in time, driven by “feeling-trends” that are bi-directionally predictive of significant social outcomes; that is, the past is future-predictive and the future is past-predictive.[20]
He states that the objectives behind Affective Encryption Analysis were to develop a research tool, both for behavior-prediction as well as for behavior-change, capable of either identifying or producing feeling-trends, and, from these trends, to then predict longer-term behavioral outcomes.[21]
Affective Encryption Analysis is based on naturalistic research designs and uses a mix of random and non-random sampling (e.g., maximum variation sampling). Sample sizes are much smaller than those typically found in more traditional methods. Analysis is also a mix of the qualitative and quantitative (regression and predictive modelling). Recent analysis efforts involve fractals, in which self-similarities are being found in data, which may suggest relations with the Feigenbaum constants.[22]
As an agent of behavior-change, Affective Encryption Analysis has been utilized as a media-design tool to aid in the marketing campaigns of both products and politicians. Herndon declines to identify specific cases in which Affective Encryption Analysis has been used in this manner, citing client confidentiality, “as well as the fact that our ability to gather naturalistic data in the future would be compromised if we began name-dropping clients.”[23]
Affective Encryption Analysis has had two recently publicized uses as a “passive” predictor of future behavior, one involving the 2008 US Presidential Election [24], and the other as a predictor of trends in anti-Semitism [25].
