One such strategy was Obama's use of a so called "Dream Team" made up of behavioral scientists and psychologists. This team provided useful insight into the minds of voters, formulating ideas for what verbal cues and subtle gestures the campaign could use to prompt the average citizen to go out and vote. The Obama campaign implemented the Dream team's ideas by sending trained volunteers with pre-written scripts door to door in swing states. The Dream Team found that if volunteers reminded citizens of past times when they voted, these citizens were more likely to vote in the current election. Additionally, the Dream Team provided strategies to combat negative images that potential voters may have of the candidate. These experts said that rather than directly denying false allegations (such as Obama being Muslim), it is better to firmly state the true counter idea (in this example that the President is a Christian). Additional tactics the team used included getting potential voters to sign unofficial pledges to vote.
While such measures may not do much to alter the outcome of a landslide election, they can make quite a difference in swaying the outcome of a close election. So what do you think? Should campaigns continue to use scientific research and behavioral psychology finds to get people to vote? I'm curious about your ideas on why this strategy may not have been implemented in the past and is only being used now.
8 comments:
If this psychological study worked to swing voters, why not take advantage of it? I can see where people may thing that the campaigners are possibly brainwashing the voters, but if they are simply using science to gain votes, I do not really see the harm in it. Furthermore, I feel a reason why this tactic may not have been used in the past is because this psychological tactic may be fairly new to science. Furthermore, it probably took some time to gather data on what was effective on possible voters. However, one part of these tactics that I disagree with is having the voters sign pledges to vote. Though they are unofficial, I do not see why they are necessary, unless they were just used for collecting data.
I think this psychological approach to GOTV campaigning is genius. I'm also surprised that this tactic hasn't been used on a regular basis before. In a way, it seems like an obvious approach, but since psychology is so massive and can be applied to almost all aspects of human interactions, maybe it just took sometime for campaigners to finally realize that there was a more effective way of urging people to vote. This is definitely the way to go in my opinion, but of course there must be some drawbacks (which I can't think of). So for any of you follow up bloggers, can you think of any negatives about this approach??
While the large impact of Obama's psychologically-based campaigning observed by this New York Times article may be something never seen before, I find it a bit hard to believe that there's anything new or revolutionary about the tactics being employed here. Elizabeth Loftus first studied the misinformation effect in the 70's, and there were theories about suggestibility and memory formation long before her.
Instead, I am more inclined to believe that the psychologists designing Obama's door-to-door campaign had greater access to accurate and detailed polling and demographic data than ever before. This would allow them to target specific aspects (such as the perception of Obama's religion). Additionally, I would agree with Addy that modern data analysis and research has probably drastically improved the psychological tactics' efficacy by gathering data from focus groups.
As long as these tactics don't become manipulative, I think they're fair game for addressing weaker aspects of candidate (such as the misinformation revolving around Obama's religion). Politics can rarely be boiled down to a science, so why not take advantage of scientific information when it's available?
Though all of the above are good points, using psychology to persuade citizens to vote is different from using psychology to persuade citizens to vote for a specific candidate. The powers of persuasion, linked with expert psychologists and scientists, seems like a scary and dangerous combination; one that is ripe with the potential for manipulation. While the extent of the persuasion may not be crossing any lines yet, who knows how far candidates will eventually go in order to win votes. Though I applaud the innovation in GOTV techniques, I'm wary of the long- term repercussions.
I agree with Marvin that the psychological approach to GOTV is effective and am equally surprised that the technique isn't used more often. Maybe because some polls were predicting a close race between Obama and Romney, the Obama campaign thought to personally persuade voters in swing states. Given that California is not a swing state, we don't get the door to door persuasion that states like Florida or Ohio get.
I also like Andrew's point about Obama having greater access to demographic data. I was very impressed by the data the Obama campaign gathered about their voters and potential voters.
The only negatives I can really think of are the typical negatives related to polling. Maybe people don't want to spend the time talking to persuaders or they lie about who they're voting for out of laziness. However, I am interested by Paniz's comment. The power of persuasion is very strong and could be borderline manipulation at times. I am equally curious to see how the next election will play out in relation to door-to-door persuaders.
I'm interested in finding out that if both parties did those psychological tactics on the same voters, like if a potential voter signed an unofficial pledge to vote for a certain candidate and then the next day the other party's "Dream Team" offered an unofficial chance to pledge to vote for their candidate, would the probability that the potential voter would vote for the party who came before decrease? Would it just make that person's decision harder or does timing really matter? I think parties will definitely try to utilize these strategies if they seem to be working, but if both parties are trying to sway opinion this way, will it be less effective? Although, I'm not very informed on whether the Republican Party also utilized psychological research-backed tactics for GOTV efforts which I'm guessing they actually probably did.
I may be misinterpreting a part of this though, by, as stated in the blog, "unofficial pledges to vote," I am taking that as unofficial pledges to vote for a particular candidate and not just to vote in general—but I guess pledging to vote at all is also effective because the potential voter has the candidate in their mind as advocated by the tactician while they are signing the pledge, and it also reduces the risk of driving away voters by being too forceful and asking only for an unbias pledge to just vote.
So, to reply to Addy, I think it is backed by behavioral psychology research that deciding to sign and seeing yourself sign a pledge, even if its unofficial, does encourage one to vote, and to vote for the candidate that was just advocated since he is fresh in that person's mind. Potential voters will be more lenient to signing something unofficial because they are not bound to it and thus not stressed by committing to anything, but this does introduce/reinforce the prospect of voting that will be turned over in the mind a few times, increasing the probability that one will finally come to a decision, after some weeks. Eh, those are my thoughts.
I also agree with everyone else that campaigns may continue to use these tactics and I see no negatives about this approach since these tactics don't necessarily go so far as to be "manipulation."
While I can see the benefits of using psychology to persuade citizens to vote, I agree with Paniz that this is a risky path for campaigning to go down. Although these tactics are completely reasonable for convincing citizens to vote (but not to vote for a specific candidate), it seems like a slippery slope from there to manipulation of the voter population through expert-assisted spin. Candidates should focus their energies on listening to what the people want, and then shape their policies around what America's citizens actually are interested in--instead of shaping how they portray their policies. Regardless of how a "Dream Team" of experts spins the image of policies and politicians, when the rubber hits the road it's the policies themselves that matter--not how they appear.
I fail to see how this technique can be deemed unfair. Although it may be using psychology to sway voters, it is essentially the same as other campaigning--it just happens to be appealing to voters in a different way. Saying that using a psychologist is unfair is comparable to saying that using an expert speechwriter is unfair. A professional speechwriter will know what to have the speaker say to win the audience's trust. Is he manipulating the audience because his speech is superior? Maybe, but I highly doubt there are any outcries against speechwriters or any other expert profession like it.
Speaking of manipulation, I have to agree with Andrew. Although I don't believe that these strategies appear to be manipulative now, if they do later that would be bad. However, such control would easily be considered unethical, in which case action could be taken against it. This also is an answer to Marvin's question: purposeful manipulation is quite the negative.
I also see many people asking why this strategy hasn't been used before. This is just my two cents, but I have a feeling it is because psychology's application to outside subjects is a relatively new concept. Things like behavioral psychology and such have been around for much of psychology's existence. Meanwhile, things like biological psychology and behavior economics (and other fields that apply psychology to other subjects) have only now been really studied. Much in the same way, this sort of political psychology (I suppose you could call it) is a somewhat modern concept as well.
Post a Comment