5 Ways to Hack Voters Brains

Before Michigan’s 2006 gubernatorial primary, an East Lansing direct-mail consultant named Mark Grebner decided to shame nonvoters. He sent citizens copies of their own publicly available voting histories, along with those of their neighbors, and said that he would deliver an updated set following the election. In response, Mr. Grebner received death threats, but his tactic worked. Those whom he targeted were 20% more likely to show up at the polls than those who received a standard get-out-the-vote reminder.

Welcome to the modern science of politics, where voters have become lab rats in an ongoing cycle of controlled trials informed by principles from behavioral psychology. Once dominated by superstition and guesswork, campaigns today are now awash in data and insights that allow them to act on that data.

As election day approaches, here are five ways that campaigns are using these new tools to sway voters:

1. Make them visualize going to the polls.

It is now standard practice for canvassers in the days before an election to ask what time a respondent plans to vote and what he or she will be doing immediately beforehand. But the volunteer never writes down the answers.

This approach was first tested before the 2008 Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, as part of a field experiment by Harvard psychologist Todd Rogers and Notre Dame political scientist David Nickerson. They were testing a concept known as “the plan-making effect”: that people who are induced to rehearse an activity are more likely to follow through.

2. Make them think voting is “cool.”

For years, politicians have beseeched citizens to do their part for democracy by telling them about the dire problem of nonvoting: Barely half of eligible Americans cast a ballot in presidential elections. But what if, instead, politicians describe the glass as half-full?

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