A field experiment shows that subtle linguistic cues might not affect voter behavior.
One of the most important recent developments in social psychology is the discovery of minor interventions that have large and enduring effects on behavior. A leading example of this class of results is in the work by Bryan et al. [Bryan CJ, Walton GM, Rogers T, Dweck CS (2011) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108(31):12653-12656], which shows that administering a set of survey items worded so that subjects think of themselves as voters (noun treatment) rather than as voting (verb treatment) substantially increases political participation (voter turnout) among subjects. We revisit these experiments by replicating and extending their research design in a large-scale field experiment. In contrast to the 11 to 14% point greater turnout among those exposed to the noun rather than the verb treatment reported in the work by Bryan et al., we find no statistically significant difference in turnout between the noun and verb treatments (the point estimate of the difference is approximately zero). Furthermore, when we benchmark these treatments against a standard get out the vote message, we estimate that both are less effective at increasing turnout than a much shorter basic mobilization message. In our conclusion, we detail how our study differs from the work by Bryan et al. and discuss how our results might be interpreted.
Department of Political Science and Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511; alan.gerber@yale.edu.
Alan S
AS
Gerber
Department of Political Science and Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511;
Gregory A
0000-0001-6804-8148
GA
Huber
Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521;
Daniel R
DR
Biggers
Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
David J
DJ
Hendry
D000328:Adult; D001519:Behavior; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D011057:Politics; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
field experiment; intervention; political science; psychology; voter turnout