"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

Re:Yeah Right

[epyT-R]

Remember there are several definitions of fairness: equality and equity. I'm a fan of equity..ie earned reward.

Typical liberal doctrine says they want equal rights.Yet their methods (laws passed, policies enacted) build systemic bias in society that benefits one group over another under the assumption (or made up malarkey) that there's an existing, systemic, opposing bias (some would call this a conspiracy theory). To my knowledge, there are no federal laws creating quotas for gays yet.. If they retain power long enough, you can bet there will be eventually. I don't just want rights for gays. I want rights for every citizen.

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For the immediate future, you're right. However, history has shown that governments tend to draw more and more power to themselves no matter how they're designed to resist that natural tendency. So, when deciding policy, I'd rather encourage a culture that knows how to handle firearms and stand up for its rights, than a soccer mom culture that fears its own shadow. The latter is easily manipulated into losing other rights, not just because it's not armed, but because it has learned helplessness syndrome. From a psychological perspective, taking gun rights away just helps grow that soccer mom impotence.
I realize that today's culture is not the midwest of the 1880s, but I dont want it becoming the 'soft' (or even eastern bloc) socialism of 1980s+ Europe either. There are elements from the former that we need to relearn in order to keep us away from the latter.

Re:Eh, they were against women voting and civil ri

[roman_mir]

Any type of income or wealth tax is theft of property but the graduated tax (the so called 'progressive' tax) is just pure discrimination.

It's all immoral and unconstitutional, it's all theft of property and treatment of people differently under law based on their specific circumstances, so it's discrimination.