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Study: You know who you're voting for

by Jason Sanders | August 22, 2008 at 09:05 am

260 views | 0 Recommendations | 5 comments

Obama or McCain, Harper or Dion. If a new study can be believed, these elections may already over in the minds of voters – whether they know it or not. A team from the University of Western Ontario tested 129 people from Vicenza, Italy for "automatic mental associations", and were able "to accurately predict the choices of 70 per cent of participants who initially said they were undecided."

There are some technical difficulties to be overcome before the research can be applied to public opinion polling . But Gawronski [Canadian research chair in social psychology at UWO] said it could eventually make it easier for pollsters to predict how the undecided will ultimately vote and, consequently, to predict the outcome of elections with greater accuracy.

He said some researchers in the United States are already using automatic association tests to determine why undecided voters seem to be flocking to Republican presidential nominee John McCain, rather than Democrat Barack Obama. The results could prove controversial.

This reminds me of an article in the Scientific American that questioned our idea of free will and the effects of believing in a programmed brain. Despite what you believe, more and more research seems to indicate a different view of free will than what has generally been imagined (or programmed to think ;).

Many scientists and philosophers are convinced that free will doesn’t exist at all. According to these skeptics, everything that happens is determined by what happened before—our actions are inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action—and this fact makes it impossible for anyone to do anything that is truly free.

Now here's a quick experiment: What would you do if you didn't believe in free will? Would you vote for someone else?

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Daniel Ess

at 13:12 on August 22nd, 2008

Just my photo of some test tubes. Thanks, Jason, for requesting permission to use it. I'm looking forward to reading your article.

Daniel Ess has contributed a photo to this story.

GOA2008

at 18:20 on August 22nd, 2008

2A3 single-ended vacuum tube integrated audio amplifier (2x3,5 watts). Input tube: EC80CC. Driver tube: 6H30. Rectifier tube: RCA 83 mercury vapour or Mullard GZ37. Fixed-bias rectifier: 5Y3. The amplifier is "blind test winner" on the CHEX 2005, Jakarta, Indonesia. See: www.langsungjadi.com, or call info(at)langsungjadi.com.

GOA2008 has contributed a photo to this story.

bernice97

at 19:32 on August 22nd, 2008

This is an MRI of my brain. I was having what the doctors thought was a TIA, which is a mild stroke. After a multitude of tests and tons of money later they still don't know what's wrong with me.
The picture your viewing I took and ran through my photo program to make it look the way it does. I'm an artist and I joked with friends that I was going to do a photo story of myself from the inside out. Thus the brain picture. Oh, they did tell me that my brain was okay, that sure was good news, at least for me.

bernice97 has contributed a photo to this story.

En Lerk

at 22:12 on August 22nd, 2008

a shot of some test tubes in my school lab. Btw, thanks jason for using my photo.

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anthonyimages

at 05:57 on August 24th, 2008

Science theme shot of gloved hand holding test tube in clamp with periodic table in background. Let me know if there are other images your interested in using. Visit www.anthonyimages.com to see more.

anthonyimages has contributed a photo to this story.