Contextual priming: where people vote affects how they vote.

Full Abstract

American voters are assigned to vote at a particular polling location (e.g., a church, school, etc.). We show these assigned polling locations can influence how people vote. Analysis of a recent general election demonstrates that people who were assigned to vote in schools were more likely to support a school funding initiative. This effect persisted even when controlling for voters' political views, demographics, and unobservable characteristics of individuals living near schools. A follow-up experiment using random assignment suggests that priming underlies these effects, and that they can occur outside of conscious awareness. These findings underscore the subtle power of situational context to shape important real-world decisions.

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Author information

Author/s: Berger, Jonah (J); Meredith, Marc (M); Wheeler, S Christian (SC);

Affiliation: Marketing Department, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. jberger(-atsign-)wharton.upenn.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Jul; vol 105 (issue 26) : pp 8846-9

Dates: Created 2008/07/07; Completed 2008/07/31;

PMID: 18574152, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Arizona
Decision Making
Education - economics
Humans

Humans
Likelihood Functions
Politics
Schools - economics

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