If you're an undecided voter, where you vote could subconsciously influence your choices. Researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford found that people who voted in schools were more likely to support increased education funding.
Wharton's Jonah Berger said that marketing specialists already knew colors and other environmental cues can influence buying decisions. But could that idea extend from the convenience store to the voting booth? The researchers first looked at voting data from Arizona's general election. That's where they found that even when they corrected for where people lived, voters in a school were more likely to back an education funding initiative.
Then they set up a laboratory experiment in which they asked people to participate in a mock vote on school funding. One group of subjects was exposed to pictures of lockers, hallways, and other images invoking school. The rest saw churches or other buildings.
Berger said he told the subjects to answer an inconsequential question about the brightness of the building images. They were told these were part of a different study unrelated to the voting one.
The result: Those who saw the school images were significantly more likely to vote for school funding.
"It's not that people are dumb," Berger said, or that they're easily manipulated. They won't switch from Obama to McCain based on a building or a wall color.
He suspects the setting matters only when voters don't enter the booth with strong opinions, and on issues where the setting is connected to the vote.
Now, that's something school officials could learn from.
- Faye Flam