Want to increase government spending on education? Locate ballot boxes in schools, suggests the research of Jonah Berger and his coauthors. Their studies find that people who vote in school buildings are more likely to endorse a tax hike that supports education than are people who vote in community centers, churches, or other polling sites.
“It’s not that people are going into schools and saying, ‘These schools need more money, and so I’m going to give it to them,’” explains Berger, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Rather, subtle cues in their environment—sights, sounds, smells—activate related concepts in their minds,” such as the idea that people should take care of schools. These gently activated concepts then drive people’s actions—usually without their knowing it.
“People aren’t aware that they are being exposed to these school-related cues, and they’re not aware that being exposed to these cues could influence their behavior,” says Berger.
Berger and colleagues first examined voting patterns in Arizona during the 2000 general election. After controlling for regional differences in political preferences and other confounds, the researchers found that 56.02 percent of voters polled in schools supported the tax increase, compared to 53.99 percent of voters polled in other types of sites. “That effect is large enough to tip a close election,” says Berger.
Next, the researchers conducted an online experiment with 327 participants from across the United States. They found that participants who first viewed photographs of well-maintained schools in an allegedly unrelated study showed more support for a tax increase to fund public schools than did participants who first viewed photographs of generic buildings.
The finding that subtle environmental cues nonconsciously affect behavior is one of the hot- test ideas to emerge from the field of social psychology. In one of the earliest demonstrations of nonconscious priming, New York University professor John Bargh showed that undergraduates who unscrambled sentences peppered with words related to the old-age stereotype—such as bingo, Florida, and gray—later walked more slowly down a hall than did undergraduates who unscrambled neutral sentences. The effect of polling places on votes is real-world evidence of nonconscious priming at work, says Berger.
“We don’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t vote in schools,” Berger says. “A lot of complex factors go into choosing polling places,” such as their location, handicap accessibility, and parking.
“But we do want to draw more attention to the selection of polling places,” he continues. “The site should minimize the influence of environmental cues.” At schools, for example, people should vote “multipurpose rooms without artifacts,” says Berger. “Don’t make them vote in a classroom with desks and kids’ drawings on the wall,” he advises.
Berger also cautions that his research does not imply that “people are dumb, or mindless machines that are totally influenced by their environments.” Instead, nonconscious priming shows how exquisitely attuned people are to their surroundings—which turns out to be a pretty brilliant strategy, most of the time.
Jonah Berger, Marc Meredith, and S. Christian Wheeler, “Contextual Priming: Where People Vote Affects How They Vote,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 2008.
Read more stories by Alana Conner.