Do The Undecided Voters Already Know How They Will Vote? Print E-mail
Government - Politics
Written by TS-Si News Service   
Saturday, 23 August 2008 16:30
Array of voters
TS-Si Politics
London, Ontario, Canada. What to do, what to do. Many people don't seem to know their voting preferance or simply refuse to say. As the US Presidential election approaches, pollsters scramble to predict the winner. A new study may give pollsters a method to predict undecided vote, even before the voters know themselves.
 
Using a common psychological testing methodology, called the implicit association test, researchers determined that sometimes people have already made up their minds at an unconscious level, even when they consciously indicate they are undecided.
 
Automatic Mental Associations Predict Future Choices of Undecided Decision-Makers. Silvia Galdi, Luciano Arcuri, and Bertram Gawronski. Science 321(5892) 1100-1102. doi: 10.1126 / science.1160769.
 
The research team tapped into automatic mental associations of participants who reported to be undecided about a controversial political issue. These associations ultimately predicted their future decisions.
 
Senior author Bertram Gawronski, Canada Research Chair in Social Psychology at University of Western Ontario (Canada)
 
Senior author Bertram Gawronski, Canada Research Chair in Social Psychology at University of Western Ontario (Canada).
 
Gawronski led a team that included members from the Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy).
 
The research findings appear in Science.
 
 
Using subjects in Vicenza, Italy, where article co-authors Silvia Galdi and Luciano Arcuri reside, the researchers interviewed 129 residents about the impending enlargement of a U.S. military base in their community. The plans were controversial, and media reports showed strong polarization among residents.
 
The researchers interviewed each subject twice, one week apart.
  • Each time the participants were first asked if they were 'pro,' 'con' or 'undecided' about the expansion.
     
  • They then were asked to answer questions about their beliefs on environmental, political, economic and other consequences of the enlargement of the base.
     
  • Finally, they were given a computer-based latency test of automatic mental associations, in which they were asked to categorize pictures of the base, and positive and negative words as quickly as possible.
The full questioning and testing was performed a second time a week later.
 
Automatic associations that undecided participants revealed in the first round significantly predicted their conscious beliefs and preferences as expressed in the second round.
 
In other words, the researchers could predict future choices of participants who were still undecided in the first session.
 
Gawronski says, "This kind of testing has many applications, but certainly political polling at election time would be one. It can't give answers to all questions, but it could certainly help pollsters to get more information than people now share."
 


Silvia Galdi and Luciano Arcuri are affiliated with the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization, Università degli Studi di Padova (Padova, Italy).

Bertram Gawronski is affiliated with the Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada).

 


Automatic Mental Associations Predict Future Choices of Undecided Decision-Makers. Silvia Galdi, Luciano Arcuri, and Bertram Gawronski. Science 321(5892) 1100-1102. doi: 10.1126 / science.1160769.

Abstract

Common wisdom holds that choice decisions are based on conscious deliberations of the available information about choice options. On the basis of recent insights about unconscious influences on information processing, we tested whether automatic mental associations of undecided individuals bias future choices in a manner such that these choices reflect the evaluations implied by earlier automatic associations. With the use of a computer-based, speeded categorization task to assess automatic mental associations (i.e., associations that are activated unintentionally, difficult to control, and not necessarily endorsed at a conscious level) and self-report measures to assess consciously endorsed beliefs and choice preferences, automatic associations of undecided participants predicted changes in consciously reported beliefs and future choices over a period of 1 week. Conversely, for decided participants, consciously reported beliefs predicted changes in automatic associations and future choices over the same period. These results indicate that decision-makers sometimes have already made up their mind at an unconscious level, even when they consciously indicate that they are still undecided.

 
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Last Updated on Saturday, 23 August 2008 11:59