"Choice Blindness" Can Transform Conservatives Into Liberals - and Vice Versa 542
ananyo writes "When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are locked in to their ideological party loyalty. But Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, knew better. When Hall and his colleagues tested the rigidity of people's political attitudes and voting intentions during Sweden's 2010 general election, they discovered that loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters were open to changing their minds. Hall's group polled 162 voters during the final weeks of the election campaign, asking them which of two opposing political coalitions — conservative or social democrat/green — they intended to vote for. The researchers also asked voters to rate where they stood on 12 key political issues, including tax rates and nuclear power. The person conducting the experiment secretly filled in an identical survey with the reverse of the voter's answers, and used sleight-of-hand to exchange the answer sheets, placing the voter in the opposite political camp. The researcher invited the voter to give reasons for their manipulated opinions, then summarized their score to give a probable political affiliation and asked again who they intended to vote for. On the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time (research paper). Hall has used a similar sleight of hand before to show that our moral compass can often be easily reversed."
Re:our moral compass can often be easily reversed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yeah Right (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yeah Right (Score:5, Funny)
>>I will ever maintain that there's no legitimate objection to gay marriage
I agree. I am in a gay relationship with my younger brother (27), who is bi and has a girlfriend. While I am not sexually attracted to her, I like her a lot and the three of us would like to get married. However, due to current laws against incest, polygamy, and gay marriage, that's not likely to happen. We are all consenting adults; why shouldn't we be allowed to have a group marriage? I could see a potential issue if it involved minors, but if one more Republi-fascist compares our living situation to bestiality (which I find disgusting, but whatever floats your boat), I'll scream.
Re:Yeah Right (Score:2, Funny)
"Really? Because the Republicans want to tax me and liberally give to oil and defense subsidies and CEOs, while the Democrats want to tax me and liberally give to the health insurance companies and alternate energy subsidies and CEOs."
A bit simplified, but for an outsider like me, it sure looks that way.
This finding will be good for the Democrats, since it's science, Republicans won't touch it with a ten foot pole, after all they have their own statistics as we saw the last election.