"Choice Blindness" Can Transform Conservatives Into Liberals - and Vice Versa

ananyo writes "When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are locked in to their ideological party loyalty. But Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, knew better. When Hall and his colleagues tested the rigidity of people's political attitudes and voting intentions during Sweden's 2010 general election, they discovered that loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters were open to changing their minds. Hall's group polled 162 voters during the final weeks of the election campaign, asking them which of two opposing political coalitions — conservative or social democrat/green — they intended to vote for. The researchers also asked voters to rate where they stood on 12 key political issues, including tax rates and nuclear power. The person conducting the experiment secretly filled in an identical survey with the reverse of the voter's answers, and used sleight-of-hand to exchange the answer sheets, placing the voter in the opposite political camp. The researcher invited the voter to give reasons for their manipulated opinions, then summarized their score to give a probable political affiliation and asked again who they intended to vote for. On the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time (research paper). Hall has used a similar sleight of hand before to show that our moral compass can often be easily reversed."

Comments

My observation

[AlphaWolf_HK]

One thing I've noticed (read: pure anecdote) is that most people who are enthusiastic about their party don't behave much differently from sports fans of opposing teams. It doesn't really matter what their side does, what matters is which letter wins the game. Even on Slashdot I've confronted a few people who say "well my side never does x abhorrent behavior" when all of ten seconds worth of Google found the opposite.

Personally I simply avoid registering to vote because all that happens is I get calls from people telling me to vote for their guy and they can't really explain why. For example I got a call from somebody on Matt Salmon's team telling me that they would repeal Obama Care, and lower medical costs through deregulation. Being a libertarian, that is music to my ears because I know from experience that red tape does raise costs in the medical field significantly. However when I asked what he would deregulate and how that would help, he didn't even know. But he expects me to vote for his guy anyways.

No thanks. I'd only register to vote if there was actually a significant movement to balance the budget and prevent what I see as an otherwise inevitable catastrophic economic collapse. I don't think that will ever happen though. Once you add social entitlements, no matter how unsustainable or unaffordable, they're basically impossible to get rid of. The best you can do is hedge your assets (gold is a horrible idea BTW) and grab your ankles.