ARTICLE https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0505-5 OPEN Sordid genealogies: a conjectural history of Cambridge Analytica’s eugenic roots ✉ Michael Wintroub1 “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 1234567890():,; lexical hypothesis and multivariate factor analysis, and how they developed in close con- junction with the history of eugenics. More particularly, it will analyze how the work of Francis Galton, Ludwig Klages, Charles Spearman, and Raymond Cattell (among others) contributed to the manifold translations between statistics, the pseudoscience of eugenics, the politics of Trumpism, and the data driven psychology of the personality championed by Cambridge Analytica. 1 University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. ✉email:
[email protected] HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES COMMUNICATIONS | (2020) 7:41 | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0505-5 1 ARTICLE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0505-5 translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek, they Once King Ptolemy gathered seventy-two elders and put might, in the same breath, have contested the veracity of its them into seventy-two houses, and did not reveal to them content. why he gathered them. He entered each room and said to “ ” Similar conundrums have troubled the ways we have thought them: Write the Torah of Moses your rabbi for me . The about translation since the invention of fiction as a genre in the Holy One, blessed by He gave counsel into each of their early modern period.