Swear–Inc

Here in Canada we’re quite a ways from another federal election (although a few provincial are underway right now) but here’s an interesting study (via The Monkey Cage) that looked at a possible way to get people to vote more often:

In each experiment, participants completed one of two versions of a brief survey. In one version, a short series of questions referred to voting using a self-relevant noun (e.g., “How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?”); in the other, questions that were otherwise identical referred to voting using a verb (e.g., “How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?”).

Without getting too much into it, people who were asked how important it was “to be a voter” had 10% higher voter turnout than those asked, “to vote”. As Andrew Gelman of The Monkey Cage points out, there was no control group so we can only compare asking one question to asking the other. Whenever studies about likelihood to vote come out, I like to think about how the political landscape could change with increased voter participation but we don’t really know what types of people might be most influenced by this type of manipulation.

But why does one phrasing incite people to vote more than another? From the study:

Noun wording leads people to see attributes as more representative of a person’s essential qualities. In one study, children thought that a child described as “a carrot eater” liked carrots more than a child who “eats carrots whenever she can” (14). In another study, adults rated their own preferences as stronger and more stable when induced to describe them with nouns (e.g., “I am a Shakespeare-reader”) than with the related verbs (e.g., “I read Shakespeare a lot”) (15).

I tend to find this stuff eerie. The thought that the choice of a couple words spoken before the election could influence someone’s tendency to vote should reinforce the idea that we’re much more prone to outside influences than we probably like to think.