2016 Election Night

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? Back in 2008, researchers in Italy and Canada proposed an idea that makes a hell of a lot of sense, at least on the surface. Maybe undecided voters have already made up their minds, but just unconsciously — they haven’t quite made explicit decisions about things they already believe. By that theory, you might be able to predict their votes by looking at the results of the same kind of speed association tests used to measure implicit racial bias. They tried it out and found that, while spoken beliefs were good at predicting the behavior of decided voters, these unspoken implicit beliefs were better at predicting what undecided voters would do. And, lo, the pollsters rejoiced. Until, that is, somebody tried to replicate the study in the context of an actual election. A different team of scientists tried to use the implicit bias technique to predict how undecided voters would vote in the 2008 U.S. presidential election and the 2009 German parliamentary elections. In both cases, the theory failed. In fact, their research found that implicit beliefs were a better predictor of decided voters’ choices, rather than undecided ones’. (Newer research has since turned up results that don’t match either study.) Why all the disagreement? The authors of the 2012 study think it might be because different kinds of elections have different psychological implications. In a presidential election, for instance, voters have probably thought about the politics involved, asked and answered questions to themselves, and established some kind of personal rhetoric. In other words, their implicit and explicit beliefs might be more likely to match.