Being a voter makes you voteMANY ELECTIONS NOW seem to depend on “turning out the base” rather than persuasion of the open-minded. To help win these turnout battles, political activists can use a new trick. Researchers at Stanford and Harvard devised two nearly identical versions of a simple voting survey: one used state-of-being words (e.g., “being a voter”), while the other used action words (e.g., “voting”). Before the 2008 presidential election in California and before the 2009 New Jersey gubernatorial election, people who completed the survey with the state-of-being words were significantly more likely to register and to vote.
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Bryan, C. et al., “Motivating Voter Turnout by Invoking the Self,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (forthcoming).
Men are odd (and women are even) IN A WORLD that sometimes seems obsessed with gender, it’s a relief that some things are gender-neutral - like numbers. Or so you would think. According to the theory of researchers at Northwestern University, the number 1 implies a solitary, dominant position - and is thus stereotypically male - while the number 2 implies pairing or communion, and is thus stereotypically female. To test the theory, they presented people with foreign names or gender-ambiguous baby pictures, adjacent to the number 1 or the number 2 (or other numbers made up entirely of odd or even digits). The number 1, and odd digits in general, conferred a more masculine identity on the names and the babies, while the number 2, and even digits in general, conferred a more feminine identity.
Wilkie, J. & Bodenhausen, G., “Are Numbers Gendered?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (forthcoming).
Kevin Lewis is an Ideas columnist. He can be reached at kevin.lewis.ideas@gmail.com.
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