I’ve written before about the social effects likely to be felt by the introduction of online voting. Here is a new one:

A recently published study by Johan Berger (Wharton), Marc Meredith (MIT), and S. Christian Wheeler (Stanford), whose title says it all “Contextual priming: Where people vote affects how they vote.” (Paper). (Hat Tip).

The study of subconscious influence has a long history. People walk slower when primed with words suggestive of old age. They are ruder when primed with aggressive words.  People who are asked the number of African countries in the UN, and then asked to spin a wheel with numbers between 1 and 100, tend to guess in a fashion correlated to the random number they spun. A mere picture of watching eyes makes people more likely to leave money for goods sold on the honour system.

It really isn’t a surprise to see evidence that where you vote can influence how you vote. The genius of the study is the palm-to-forehead slap of why didn’t anyone think about this before?

The authors first look at a ballot initiative in the 2000 Arizona general election that proposed an increase in education spending. They divided the precincts between schools and non-schools, and found that voters who voted in a school had a marginal preference (3 points) for the initiative. To test the robustness of the priming explanation, they performed regression analysis that controlled for a number of other possible explanations and found the result still held.

They then conducted a user study in a lab to explicitly test for priming effects during voting. The randomly assigned 327 participants to be shown either pictures of schools or other buildings, under the guise of an unrelated experiment, and then asked them to vote on an education initiative. They also collected, prior to the study, demographic and political preference information to help control against other influencing factors. The results were consistent with a priming hypothesis: voters exposed to images of schools had a preference for the initiative (7 points).

The paper concludes with a discussion of how different polling places may also prime voters: for example, the majority of Arizona’s polling places were churches which may influence votes on social issues. Given the amount of money spent for any edge in an election, I would not be surprised to see parties trying to influence the selection of polling places to those which correspond to specific initiatives they back.

Which leads us to an interesting secondary effect of online voting: does the effect disappear if you get to vote from your home or at least, a place of your choosing? What tactics could parties use to prime online voters?

Tags: Psychology of Voting

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Economics of Voting, Psychology of Voting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.