Sordid genealogies: a conjectural history of Cambridge Analytica’s eugenic roots

“Sordid Genealogies: A Conjectural History of Cambridge Analytica’s Eugenic Roots” explores the history of the methods employed by Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 US presidential election. It focuses on the history of psychometric analysis, trait psychology, the lexical hypothesis and multivariate factor analysis, and how they developed in close conjunction with the history of eugenics. More particularly, it analyzes how the work of Francis Galton, Ludwig Klages, Charles Spearman, and Raymond Cattell (among others) contributed to translations between statistics, the pseudoscience of eugenics, the politics of Trumpism, and the data-driven psychology of personality championed by Cambridge Analytica.

Michael Wintrob