Your grocery cart says a lot about your political allegiances, this app says

Did you know that the contents of your grocery cart can say a lot about your political affiliations? This is what the Laval University team behind the application revealed Datagotchiwhich aims to overhaul the way surveys and data are analyzed.

According to Yannick Dufresne, the co-founder of the application, Datagotchi builds its analyzes on the social aspect of voting which is often obscured by traditional consultations.

“We ask questions about where we come from. We seek to understand sociodemographic variables. What do we eat, what do we drink? All that is a voting indicator,” says the professor.

A user who wants to participate in the project Datagotchi All you have to do is create an avatar on the platform and answer several questions about your preferences, whether in terms of food or leisure activities.

Hubert, a student who works with Yannick Dufresne, says these responses allow the system to paint a voter profile.

“We start with our avatar here which is a little empty. It’s a robot. He doesn’t yet have a personality, he doesn’t yet have an appearance,” he explains. This character will evolve over the course of the responses in order to embody the profile of the respondent.

“The data will be used in the model that we will build to predict partisan preferences [pour l’élection] in the United States,” adds Hubert.

According to Laurence Olivier, another researcher, the films viewed by users can also reflect the political allegiances of respondents.

“One of the questions we asked in the application was to know if the respondent had watched Barbie or Oppenheimer, the two films which had been launched at the same time and which were all the rage. Then, to our great surprise, what we discovered was that the fact of not having watched these films was one of the most significant factors of being a Republican,” he notes.

Yannick Dufresne believes that this data allows researchers to understand how candidates campaign in such a divided America.

“Segmentation is done exactly” on socio-demographic factors, he illustrates, which allows political parties to “target certain voters on certain issues”.

“These segmentations are based on more “lifestyle” variables that we compile,” he adds.

See the full explanation in the video above.