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Edited by Brian Skyrms, University of California, Irvine, CA, and approved June 22, 2011 (received for review March 1, 2011)
Abstract
Three randomized experiments found that subtle linguistic cues have the power to increase voting and related behavior. The phrasing of survey items was varied to frame voting either as the enactment of a personal identity (e.g., “being a voter”) or as simply a behavior (e.g., “voting”). As predicted, the personal-identity phrasing significantly increased interest in registering to vote (experiment 1) and, in two statewide elections in the United States, voter turnout as assessed by official state records (experiments 2 and 3). These results provide evidence that people are continually managing their self-concepts, seeking to assume or affirm valued personal identities. The results further demonstrate how this process can be channeled to motivate important socially relevant behavior.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: cbryan{at}stanford.edu.
Author contributions: C.J.B. and G.M.W. designed research; C.J.B. and T.R. performed research; T.R. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; C.J.B. and G.M.W. analyzed data; and C.J.B., G.M.W., and C.S.D. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1103343108/-/DCSupplemental.
Motivating voter turnout by invoking the self
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