Many recent news stories make you wonder if we're on a path to total and irredeemable moral bankruptcy.
Digital and banking scams are impacting a quarter of all Brazilians. How many times have you received fake calls from the "bank" about suspicious charges on your account or card? Has anyone impersonated you on WhatsApp?
The "Narco-believers" - In Brazil, we have a strong history of syncretism in beliefs, but the merging of these two worlds is one of the most bizarre. And we thought the Dark Ages were behind us!
Some politicians and business people are behaving more and more like cult leaders. They act like they are divine and play down every fault. And they control the narrative relentlessly, especially when things aren't going well. Have you seen the Netflix documentary "How to Become a Cult Leader?" If not, you should!
The perverse incentives for exaggerated promises in the tech world. It seems that inflated stories of billions of dollars (or trillions!) are almost necessary to justify the amount of capital raised. What happens to this game now that there's a larger injection of public money?
A shift towards the law of the jungle in geopolitics, and braggadocio as the standard winning modus operandi in elections around the world - I don't think I need to link to that, right?
One of The Economist's covers this month - with everything happening in the world, this issue being central enough for a cover story says something about the state of things. The article is about how the scam industry may be surpassing drug trafficking in market value.
Some of these are specifically related to social media dynamics:
Some of the most followed local influencers are paid for people's betting losses (mostly poor people, nearly half of them in debt) who believe in them. Large brands are fully aware and continue to pay for campaigns with these same influencers.
People are doing increasingly questionable things for engagement, which suggests that even factoring in the reputational damage, the increased cash flow still makes it worth it.
Figures like Raiam Santos (multiple convictions, not imprisoned only because he cut a deal) and Andrew Tate (convicted criminal, imprisoned for human trafficking) are celebrated on social media.
Influencers for illegal mining in the Amazon are teaching followers how to produce and use liquid mercury – it got so bad that the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) is investigating.
Coaches are recruiting armies of editors to work for free with the promise of future visibility.
“We’ll not be able to pay you, but this work will give you long term visibility.” Apparently, the oldest trick in the world still works.
In our world of research, strategy, and insights, there's also trickery going on...
Social listening studies present numbers and percentages of mentions as if they were directly asked and statistically representative, misleading the reader. Quantitative studies from the same period tell a very different story.
Study universe: the bubble that spontaneously mentioned their goals on social media in this specific time frame. "It's no longer a priority" for whom?
Trend studies interview trendy friends and generalize to all of humanity, or assume that because something happens in NY, it will happen here. It is as if the chasm of innovation weren’t a reality for so many products and behaviors, as if anecdotal evidence and faint signals were the same thing.
Sounds familiar? Via Edmond Lau
Quantitative research distributed via social media where the universe should be "people who saw the post asking for help filling out the questionnaire" and not any public they are trying to understand. If you're doing commercial market research and not university homework, have the dignity to do or hire professional data collection instead of letting an opaque algorithm define your sample.
Brazilian specialized media outlets talking about a new generation that hasn't even been born yet, claiming it was defined with "broad consensus." Meanwhile, the organization that's perhaps the biggest global authority on the subject has already said it will almost completely abandon generations as a cohort. This came after receiving an open letter signed by 150 demographers and social scientists giving them a major dressing-down (essential reading for marketers, as is this other article!) stating that these groupings suggest similarities that don't exist and are anti-scientific. Is broad consensus just you and the voices in your head, buddy? What else needs to happen before it clicks that generations are the apple cider vinegar of segmentation?
If you want to protect yourself from these, you'll have to learn more about research methodology and biases instead of just buying a brand or blindly accepting a colleague's recommendation. Maybe the people saying that critical thinking will be the most fundamental skill post-AI are right.
Could being constantly exposed to the success of others, whether fictional or real, from people who were completely off our radar before, be pushing more people towards "anything goes?"
These mood swings have such a practical effect on markets like finance that there are indices like the CNN Business Fear and Greed Index, which exist precisely to try to measure herd behavior guided by both emotions. As Warren Buffett wisely said, when we see people we consider less intelligent than us making more money, it causes behavioral contagion and irrationality, and even enlightened people end up doing stupid things.
Could the promise of easy and fast money from markets like bets, dropshipping, affiliate marketing, and some varieties of information products and cryptocurrencies be making us more greedy? It's already impacting popular culture at some level. (don't open that link at the office!).
The problem with the amplified visibility of scams and supposedly easy money is that it can generate a feeling in those who are honest or outside this game of being left behind or not doing enough.
One of the things that characterizes the times we live in is the confusion of visibility with authority. Could some highly visible people be becoming "too big to fail" like the banks in 2008, because at some level visibility is always monetizable regardless of the controversies and atrocities they're involved in? Impunity is also a powerful incentive for bad behavior, both for those who are already doing it and for those who are thinking about doing it.
Could it be that, as a result, pursuing visibility at all costs has become part of the spirit of our times because it's increasingly seen as the fastest way to manufacture credibility and turn it into money?...
The nostalgia for the 2000s is hot right now. Would the 2025 version would be “get followers…?”
One of the most interesting ways to map trends is to see if new behaviors are nurturing markets that support these behaviors, measuring by proxy, as statisticians say. An example that fits here: luxury car rentals, with a complete filming and photography package, are swimming in money - is that a sign that the search for social proof using fancy watches, square houses in gated communities, and these types of cars is on the rise?
Now taking a step back, is this true if we look at the grand arcs of history and the data?
I've talked before about interpersonal trust in Brazil being among the lowest in the world consistently - with several practical implications, all undesirable. There's a very cool IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) paper about how this affects business and public management, and it certainly affects our relationships.
Our trust in the political class is consistently among the lowest in the world, and that's not news to anyone. The problem is that "as above, so below" as Jorge Ben Jor said and, before him, the hermetics. There are studies that shows, albeit in other countries, that lower trust in institutions leads to a greater tolerance for corruption, and these two things have mutual causality, that is, one thing feeds the other.
There are a lot of things that we consider within a moral gray area or things that "everyone" does that would be absolutely unacceptable in other countries:
Pricing things differently with or without a receipt, a naturalization of tax evasion.
Making a fake student ID to pay half price at shows, a falsification of personal documents that is socially accepted.
Paying a "flanelinha" (street parking attendant), which is being complicit with a very poorly disguised type of extortion.
All these things, among several other similar behaviors, suggest that we are moral relativists and not moral absolutists. There is always someone else that we see as having unfair advantages against us that we use to justify our worst acts: the State that takes so much from us while giving so little in return, the employer who demands more than agreed even while paying us so poorly, the evil gigantic company that screws over its customers - a cumulative effect of low interpersonal and institutional trust. No one is the villain in their own narrative, but at the same time the feeling of dishonesty is omnipresent - what kind of math is that? Not to mention the figure of the malandro (hustler), which is kind of a foundational myth of Brazil.
Us and the others. Via Tom Gauld
Besides these things, regarding values, Brazilians are reasonably consistent in a few things:
We are altruistic, but punitive: we want others to be helped and have opportunities, but if they make mistakes or commit crimes, we want harsh punishments. What is implicit is that we don't believe in second chances.
At the same time that we are very distrustful of the political class, we expect the State to solve a lot of problems. How do we reconcile that?
We also seem to be in a long transition from a Catholic morality based in part on "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven" to a different path, guided by the theology of prosperity and the growing number of evangelicals, and also by the increasing number of people who are not religiously affiliated. This is a hot topic in the Humanities and affects things like how we deal with success, money, and public policies.
Are we moving towards a new "Brazilian Protestant ethic," more adapted to a cultural context that is more every person for themselves and individualistic than in other predominantly Protestant, but developed countries?
It turns out that this idea of moral decline, which is understanding that our collective moral values are getting worse, is recurrent over decades and may be a collective illusion, another subject that I have already mentioned here.
Two researchers from Harvard and Columbia did a large study based on the analysis of 177 opinion surveys in the US (done since the 40s!) and 58 around the world, including in Brazil, and discovered that this feeling of worsening is constant since the 60s without clear signs of a real worsening.
But it's not that simple - another researcher of collective illusions who conducted several studies, Todd Rose, states that the illusions of a certain group become the private opinions of the next generation.
There are many factors here that may indeed be pushing us in this direction, but the counterpoints are also very strong, in a subject that is particularly difficult to measure, even because getting people to admit their own dishonesty publicly and the effect of others on them is not simple at all. It is very difficult to have a definitive answer and often, understanding people is like that.
But the real learning here is, if we judge ourselves using easy and cheap behavioral data (social media) but with a gigantic sampling bias, we run an enormous risk of taking the part for the whole and making silly decisions as a result, an increasingly common mistake in many companies - the trickery with social listening that I pointed out earlier in the text has everything to do with that.
What is certain is that we need, as executives and strategists, to stop treating what happens on social media as representative of our collective reality, no matter how much it is in fact capable of influencing us. And understand that many of us in marketing and communications are part of a "chronically online" bubble totally disconnected from the rest of the country, which makes hearing the silent majority increasingly important.
This same dynamic of visibility at all costs creates perverse incentives for publishing very impactful but extremely poorly substantiated things, like "Generation Z doesn't drink anymore" or "Generation Z traded Google search for TikTok." It's not just about having access to research, but knowing how to evaluate the origin and quality of these data and processes and doing what we researchers already do (or should do) all the time - imagining the countless ways we could be wrong before opening our mouths.
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