Can’t decide between Barack Obama and John McCain? Chances are your brain already has.
Using a simple word association test to look inside voters’ heads, Canadian and Italian researchers found that many voters who believe they are undecided have unconsciously made up their minds.
Their decisions arise less from careful deliberation than from deep-seated attitudes that they have little awareness of, the study found.
The researchers said it’s all part of an unconscious decisiveness that manifests itself in the mundane snap decisions people make every day, such as choosing which shoe to put on first or which seat to take on an empty bus.
The study focused on a minor political debate in Italy, but the method is being used in an Internet experiment peering into the minds of undecided U.S. voters. Those voters — about 10 percent of the electorate — are expected to tip the outcome of what is expected to be a close presidential election.
The research, published today in the journal Science, used a computerized test in which participants were asked to react as quickly as possible to images arbitrarily deemed “good” or “bad.” The test measured response times.
Scientists selected 33 residents of Vincenza, Italy, who stated that they were undecided about a proposal to expand a nearby U.S. military base.
They were instructed to press the letter “d” when they saw a picture of a military base or one of five positive words, such as joy, pleasure or happiness, and the letter “k” when they saw one of the negative words, which included pain, ugly or danger.
The researchers then reversed the test so that the image of the military base was linked to the negative words.
The theory behind the test is that people will hesitate when required to perform actions incompatible with their unconscious attitudes. So subjects who unconsciously favored the base expansion took more time to react when it was associated with negative words, and subjects against the expansion delayed when it was associated with positive words.
The lag in reaction time averaged between 100 and 200 milliseconds.
One week after administering the test, nine previously undecided subjects said they now favored the base, 10 said they had decided against it and 14 remained undecided. Participants’ responses on the test a week earlier and an accompanying opinion survey were about 70 percent accurate in predicting their actual decisions.
