The hidden psychology of voting

By Zaria Gorvett

Votes are cast based on rational decisions, right? Not necessarily we may not be as in control of our
preferences as we like to think, writes Zaria Gorvett.

It hits the moment you board the train that unmistakeable tang of stale urine. You take a seat. The
passenger opposite sneezes across the aisle. As you move out of the way, your foot lands in a gooey clot
of chewing gum. Disgusted yet? How you react may say more about you than you might realise it may
even reveal your political leanings.

What the candidates actually say has little impact on voters decisions Jon Krosnick, psychologist

Its not the only thing that can influence your politics without your knowledge. Whenever an election
looms, voters must spend months wrestling with policies, politicians, and ideologies. As voting day
arrives, its time for some rational calculations at the ballot box. Or is it?

We may not be as in control of our own vote as we like to think, according to many psychologists.
Education, healthcare, and the economy all matter, but voter choices can also be swayed by factors
ranging from how easily disgusted and fearful people are, to how they react to the weather and sports
results.

Subtle sway

Its well known that our conscious decisions are routinely influenced by unconscious thought-processes,
emotions and prejudices. Jon Krosnick, political science professor at Stanford University, has devoted his
career to the phenomenon. What we know now from 50 years of psychology is you can divide the brain
into two parts, he explains. In fact, all decision-making is unconscious.

Krosnick argues that during televised debates, although voters are listening to the candidates, other
factors can have as much, if not more, impact on voters decisions. For example, he and colleagues

found that in the 2008 US presidential election, many voters were more influenced by the ethnicity of
the candidates Barack Obama and John McCain than they may have realised themselves. People
with higher scores of implicit racial prejudice which is unconsciously-held were less likely to vote for
Obama.

Studies have found that the politically conservative tend to be more easily disgusted (Credit: iStock)

Yoel Inbar, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, studies another hidden way we may be
influenced by things that trigger feelings of disgust. Inbar placed test participants on a disgust scale,
asking them to rate their agreement with stomach-wrenching statements and situations, such as you
discover that a friend of yours changes underwear only once a week. Subjects were then quizzed on
their political ideology.

He found that the more easily disgusted tend to be politically conservative. We have good data on
basically every world region except sub-Saharan Africa. And we see a pretty consistent relationship,
Inbar says.

Inbar believes the political and moral associations with disgust and disease can be explained by some
prehistoric biology. As people started to spend more time in large social groups, they developed a set of
behaviours that would minimise the risk of catching disease, what psychologists call the behavioural
immune system.

Other research suggests that how you feel on the day may have an influence too. One study found that
making people think about disease can encourage them to think negatively about racial differences.
Similarly, a US study in 2014 found that people who felt unwell were more likely to favour attractive
candidates than their less physically appealing opponents.
Physical appearance became a factor in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates. Studies have shown voters
have a bias toward more physically attractive candidates (Credit: Getty Images)

The attitudes that flow from the behavioural immune system are things we tend to think of as socially
conservative, says Inbar. They are about avoiding groups that you are not familiar with, about

adhering to traditional social practices, and they are also about sexual restrictedness. Disgust is the
emotion that really says hey dont do that, stay away from that, thats dangerous for you.

Intriguingly, in another experiment, Inbar and colleagues found that priming people to feel disgust
using bad smells in a room made them temporarily more likely to shun certain minority groups, such
as homosexual men.

The implication is that political campaigning and media commentary using disgust triggers for
example, saying policies stink may have a deeper influence on some people than first appears. A few
years ago, one US politician took this to an extreme by infusing campaign leaflets with the smell of
garbage.

Strong fear

A study into the impact of 'fear sensitivity' on political ideology suggests similar conclusions. A group of
46 people from Nebraska were asked about their views on a range of political issues, from the Iraq war
to capital punishment. Those with strong opinions were invited to continue to part two.

Next the volunteers were subjected to a series of threatening images, such as a frightened man with a
spider on his face, and were startled with loud noises while they were assessed for physiological
responses to fear, such as how conductive their skin was. The researchers found that the more easily
startled people in the group tended to have more right-wing views, a result which fits with an emerging
pattern of conservatives as more sensitive to negative aspects of the environment.

So perhaps political rhetoric that provokes fear emphasising the risks of terrorism, economic instability
and so on can have a subtle but powerful effect on some groups of people when it is used to try and
sway votes.

Go negative

Other subconscious biases are already exploited by political campaigns. One such effect is the so-called
negativity bias, a well-documented tendency of people to preferentially remember negative
information, and allow negative emotions to dominate decision-making.

Krosnicks research suggests that when politicians emphasise the negative qualities of their opponent, it
can increase turnout of their supporters. Back in the 1990s, he studied how peoples feelings towards
politicians affected their likelihood of turning up to vote. As you would expect, he found that liking both
candidates equally affords little motivation to vote. But even if a voter likes them unequally, they still
arent very interested. Dislike, on the other hand, is a much more compelling reason to cast ones ballot.
If you dislike at least one of the two candidates, then you really are motivated to participate so in
other words its really disliking a candidate that motivates turnout, says Krosnick.

(Credit: Chris Ware/Getty)

Bad weather can affect voting behaviour (Credit: Chris Ware/Getty Images)

Decisions based on negative emotions can also work the other way. A growing body of evidence shows
that voters unconsciously punish politicians when things dont go their way even issues entirely
unconnected to politics.

Such fickle voting habits are most vividly illustrated in the contest between Al Gore and George W Bush
in 2000. The election followed a series of severe droughts and floods, which left political scientists Larry
Bartels and Christopher Achen wondering: would voters blame their bad luck on the incumbent
Democrats? An analysis of voting and weather patterns across 54 states showed that their share was up
to 3.6% lower than it normally would have been. Or as the authors put it "2.8 million people voted
against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet".

Such retributions are not unique to the weather the effect stretches to football results, too. A US study
of electoral outcomes over 44 years found that local college games up to 10 days before had an impact,
with surprising results bestowing the most favour on incumbent politicians.

If voting patterns can come from unconscious biases, does that decrease their validity? Its an
interesting question, says Inbar. [If] I can explain why you like ice cream, are you then wrong to like ice
cream? On an individual basis, I dont think so.

Yet its clearly worth being aware of the factors that may trigger your hidden biases the next time you
place your vote in the ballot box.