Science discovers ‘magic trick’ that causes partisan voters to switch parties

[xchrom]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/11/science-discovers-magic-trick-that-causes-partisan-voters-to-switch-parties/

Researchers in Sweden have discovered a clever way to trick partisan voters into switching parties, through the application of a simple survey and some slight of hand.

Exploiting a known defect in human psychology called “choice blindness,” researchers writing for the journal PLoS One got 162 voters to fill out surveys pinpointing their views on key issues like taxes and energy, then covertly switched the survey with one created to show the exact opposite answers. Participants were then confronted on why they gave the faux responses.

What the researchers found is astonishing: A whopping 92 percent of respondents did not catch that their answers were manipulated, and only 22 percent of the switched answers were noticed by participants. During questioning after the survey, 10 percent of the subjects actually switched their preference in political party, while another 19 percent of previously partisan voters said they’d become undecided.

Since 18 percent of the participants went into the study saying they were undecided to begin with, researchers noted that their findings suggest a full 47 percent were open to changing their vote. They also noted their findings seem to run contrary to the political wisdom of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), who suggested months before election day that 47 percent of the country had already ruled him out.

Researchers added that they found “no connection between gender, age, level of political engagement, overall political certainty, or initial political affiliation, in relation to magnitude of change in voting intention.”

[gateley]

1. Does this seem plausible to you?

Can you see them handing you back "your" doctored responses and NOT hollering "That's not what I wrote!"

Maybe I'm missing something.

[Vincardog]

2. It is only plausible if the respondents were as stupid as the PTB think we are.

[winter is coming]

4. No, it doesn't. If they were lucky, I'd think I'd misread the questions.

But it's unlikely I'd misread lots and lots of them, so I'd call bullshit.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. The paper says that many respondents did think they'd misread the question

or got the 'scale' the wrong way round.

Each participant had on average 6.8 (SD = 1.9) answers manipulated, with a mean manipulated distance of 35.7 mm (SD = 18.7) on the 100 mm scale. The participants were explicitly asked to state reasons on average 4.0 (SD = 1.6) of the manipulated trials, and of those were on average 0.9 (SD = 1.0) answers corrected by the participants to better match their original intention (i.e. a trial-based correction rate of 22%). At an individual level, 47% of the participants did not correct any answers, while 53% corrected between 1–4 answers. For all answers classified as corrected, the participants indicated that they had misread the question, or marked the wrong end of the scale. Only a single participant expressed any suspicion that we had manipulated her profile.

The number of corrected answers were not related to gender, age, or political affiliation as defined by prior voting intention (p = n.s.). The distance being manipulated on the scale did not differ between corrected and non-corrected answers (p = n.s.). Finally, there were no differences in self-rated political engagement or in political certainty between participants who corrected no answers and participants who made one or more corrections (p = n.s.)

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0060554

And that's an important part of it, that I think the original Raw Story article doesn't bring out enough - people think they are prone to mistakes, and when apparently confronted with evidence, will assume that's what happened.

What I also think it shows is that many people are capable of doublethink - holding 2 opposing opinions in their heads at once, and bringing them out depending on how a discussion is going. And you wantto justify what you think were your answers:

[JHB]

10. That can be a factor in referendums and the like...

The wording (out of clumsiness or deliberate obfuscation, depending on who wrote it) is sometimes counterintuitive, and needs entire awareness campaigns to make sure people know what a "yes" or "no" vote is actually for.

[Blue Owl]

3. Betchya Karl Rove will be on this like stink on shit

n/t

[Wednesdays]

6. ON this? Are you from Mars?

Rove likely invented the technique!

[demwing]

5. I'd bet that many "undecided" voters =/= "open to changing their vote" voters

more like "undecided" = "already decided, but likes to give the appearance of having thought about this for a while"
or
"undecided" = "already decided, but loves to make the salesman work for it" (you've may have seen the type, if you're in sales, I'm sure you have.)

[RainDog]

7. Dan Kahan did a similar studies in the U.S.

http://www.climateaccess.org/resource/collection/cultural-cognition-studies-dan-kahan

And another study indicated that people decide whom to believe based upon their level of association with that person... i.e. a church pastor will make a claim that's false (about global warming, for instance) and the congregants will decide to believe him rather than climate scientists.

It's impossible to know everything going on, so we do have to find trustworthy people to share data with us.

And that's where and how such bias comes in.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Exactomundo