A field experiment shows that subtle linguistic cues might not affect voter behavior
- aDepartment of Political Science and Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511;
- bDepartment of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521;
- cDepartment of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
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Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved April 20, 2016 (received for review July 12, 2015)
Significance
An important development in social psychology is the discovery of minor interventions that have large behavioral effects. A leading example is a recent PNAS paper showing that a modest intervention inspired by psychological theory—wording survey items to encourage subjects to think of themselves as voters (noun treatment) rather than as voting (verb treatment)—has a large positive effect on political participation (voter turnout). We replicate and extend these experiments. In a large-scale field experiment, we find that encouraging subjects to think of themselves as voters rather than as voting has no effect on turnout and we estimate that both are less effective than a standard get out the vote mobilization message.
Abstract
One of the most important recent developments in social psychology is the discovery of minor interventions that have large and enduring effects on behavior. A leading example of this class of results is in the work by Bryan et al. [Bryan CJ, Walton GM, Rogers T, Dweck CS (2011) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108(31):12653–12656], which shows that administering a set of survey items worded so that subjects think of themselves as voters (noun treatment) rather than as voting (verb treatment) substantially increases political participation (voter turnout) among subjects. We revisit these experiments by replicating and extending their research design in a large-scale field experiment. In contrast to the 11 to 14% point greater turnout among those exposed to the noun rather than the verb treatment reported in the work by Bryan et al., we find no statistically significant difference in turnout between the noun and verb treatments (the point estimate of the difference is approximately zero). Furthermore, when we benchmark these treatments against a standard get out the vote message, we estimate that both are less effective at increasing turnout than a much shorter basic mobilization message. In our conclusion, we detail how our study differs from the work by Bryan et al. and discuss how our results might be interpreted.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: alan.gerber{at}yale.edu.
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Author contributions: A.S.G., G.A.H., D.R.B., and D.J.H. designed research, performed research, contributed new reagents/analytic tools, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors acknowledge funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
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This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1513727113/-/DCSupplemental.
