Lhe election is approaching and there may still be many citizens who feel undecided… Undecided, really? The test of implicit associations, widely used to study cognitive biases, and developed by the team of Anthony Greenwald, from the University of Washington, makes it possible to check whether this is really the case. Rather than asking you explicitly about an electoral proposal, and therefore expecting a conscious response from you, you will be asked to associate as quickly as possible (without thinking) a proposal (or a candidate’s face) with a positive (for example, success) or negative (for example, failure) word. By doing so, we have access to your automatic, non-conscious judgment on this proposal or on this candidate.
In an article published in the journal Science in 2008, Silvia Galdi and her colleagues from the University of Padua interviewed 129 participants, residing in Vicenza, Italy, about the expansion of a military base. Participants first had to answer an explicit question: “Are you for, against, or undecided about this project? » In addition, they were asked ten explicit social, environmental or political questions on the subject. Finally, they were offered a computerized task of implicit associations, which consisted of associating photos from the database as quickly as possible with positive or negative words. Importantly, subjects were tested twice, one week apart.
Beliefs lurking in our brain
The results show that the automatic measures of undecided participants at the first evaluation significantly predict the conscious measures at the second evaluation. The researchers thus hypothesize that our convictions may already be lurking in our brains, unconsciously, even before we are fully aware of them. The same Italian team, using the same type of procedure, showed that this same type of implicit associations, four weeks before a presidential election, could predict the future vote of voters, whether they were undecided or determined on their vote at come at the time of the experiment. But, as is often the case in research, another team, that of Malte Friese, from the University of Saarbrücken, did not find this “predictive” effect of implicit associations on future voting.
Never mind, Giulia Galli of Kingston University and her colleagues in Rome and Melbourne turned to a measure that tests our unconscious preferences: the recording of brain activity by electroencephalography during that future voters gave their degree of agreement or disagreement with political proposals, five weeks before an election. Their hypothesis being that a specific brain wave, the N400, would be more ample in participants who disagreed with a proposition. The results show that indeed the amplitude of this wave predicts voters’ voting intentions much better than explicit questionnaires and implicit association tests.
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