Crowdshifting The Vote

I read a fascinating article today in a blog published by Personal Democracy Media called TechPresident about a new persuasion tactic campaigns are using to turn out the vote. It's not the usual stuff boasting about a candidate's record or scaring voters about the opposition's nefarious plans. It's straight-up peer pressure. The letter contains a list of names, including the recipient and several neighbors, noting who voted and who didn't in the most recent elections.

It's all information drawn from public records, and while some people find it creepy, and Big-Brotherish, it seems to work. As the blog notes:

"The academic literature has shown that voters are more likely to participate in elections when you disclose or threaten to disclose their electoral participation, presumably because voting is a social norm or a socially desirable activity and they don't want to be perceived as violating those norms."

When it comes to changing behavior -- whether that's getting people to vote, getting them to cut back on the junk food, or encouraging more savings for retirement -- the pressure of social expectations seem to work when more targeted  appeals  (be they rational, moral, or emotional) fail. Social psychologists call it "crowdshifting." Everybody else is doing it!  Why aren't you?

For example, one recent study found that hotel guests were far more likely to re-use their towels during multi-day visits when the placard announcing the program noted that 75 percent of hotel guests took part, rather than touting the program's environmental benefits. In another study, university students were far more likely to cheat on a test when another test taker (a confederate of the researchers) obviously cheated -- but only when the cheater wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of the university where the study took place, rather than a t-shirt bearing the name of the school's bitter cross-town rival. 

Want more young people to vote? Bemoaning the dismal turnout among the youngest voters is not the way to go. A 2009 study in the Journal of Politics found that this tactic actually made people less likely to vote. With due respect to the contrarians among us, people are usually far more motivated to be part of a trend than to buck one! 

Election Expectations, PollyVote, and the Charismometer

In a previous post, I wrote that undecided voters may be influenced by a less-obvious bit of persuasion - the momentum of a narrative, the apparent shift in a candidate's prospects from one day to the next, the poll-based stories that no news team can resist. Given a choice, all other things apparently being equal, who wouldn't want to back a winner?

I had this in mind when I came across a new study by Andreas Graefe, a German forecasting guru who found that one tool for predicting election outcomes has been largely overlooked in recent decades, despite it's astounding accuracy: the voter expectation survey. Rather than asking people who they intend to vote for, these surveys ask, "Who do you think is going to win?" Graefe looked at 190 of them conducted between 1932 and 2008 and found them to be 91 percent accurate. Looking at the six elections between 1988 to 2008, voter expectation surveys did better at predicting the winner than polls, prediction markets, econometric models, and the judgment of pooled experts).

Despite this record, Graefe doesn't think we should neglect those other forecasting methods. Better to combine them all into one -- thereby canceling out the biases and shortcomings of each. He and some colleagues have done this with an election forecasting model they call PollyVote. In a 2011 study of the model, Graefe and colleagues looked at daily forecasts for 100 days prior to each of the five elections between 1992 and 2008 made by polls, econometric models, the Iowa Electronic Markets (prediction market established at the University of Iowa), and PollyVote. On average, PollyVote reduced the error in forecasts at least 30 percent, except when compared to the 7-day average of the IEM, where it did about 8 percent worse. However, PollyVote did better than IEM in daily predictions of who would win: PollyVote predicted the winner on 96 of the 100 days, on average, compared to 76 by IEM. In case you're wondering, PollyVote has projected Barack Obama winning at least 51 percent of the popular vote every day this year and never gone above 52.5 percent. Try to make a narrative out of that. Boring!

If you've slogged this far, here's your video reward, featuring John Antonakis, a psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is predicting the presidential election with something he calls the charismometer. Simplified, it is the index of "Charismatic Leadership Tactics" (CLTs) used by the presidential candidates in their nomination acceptance speeches. There are 12 CLTs, such as using metaphors, drawing contrasts, asking rhetorical questions, and utilizing gestures. And, according to Antonakis, this is precisely the sort of election -- where the economic picture is muddled and voters aren't sure whether to punish or reward the incumbent party -- when charisma really matters. According to the charismometer, Obama will prevail. I'll let Antonakis explain:

Bragging Season

There's been some nice early coverage of Mind Over Mind, including a stellar review by renowned psychologist Irving Kirsch in New Scientist magazine, and a short feature on the book in O, The Oprah Magazine by Emma Haak. Also, many thanks to Jeff Glor and CBS News Online for the Author Talk Q&A!

Voting for a Narrative

It's not news that campaigns try to win debates by lowering the expectations for their candidate's performance to the point where sentience and continence while on stage counts as victory. Here's The Daily Show's take on the strategy.

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Democalypse 2012 - Negate Expectations - The Presidential Debates
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It's such a well-worn ploy, and so easily mocked, that one wonders who remains to be taken in by  pre-debate expectations limbo. Certainly, it's not the more than 90 percent of the electorate who has already made up their minds. They are unlikely to be swayed by the debates. And I don't really think it's the much sought after undecided voters, not directly anyway. They just aren't paying enough attention. They may watch the debates themselves, but most of aren't tuning in for all the pre-debate punditry on the Sunday talk shows.

No, the expectations gambit is aimed squarely at one audience: the media. It's a solipsistic little game with big potential impact on the election. Because the news, particularly political campaign coverage, lives and dies on narratives, especially "horse race" narratives of who's gaining and who's losing. Among the forces that remain for influencing undecided votes in one direction or another, the momentum of a good narrative is among the most powerful, and the most superficial. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat points out in "The Media Bias That Matters":

"As a presidential candidate part of your job is to be aware of how easily the horse race narrative can overwhelm whatever story you want the country to be hearing, and to do everything in your power to actively shape a narrative that will inevitably be shaped by the press’s zeal for “who’s up/who’s down” reportage as well."