Really! This is fun! It's not another dry argument about the myth of the independent voter, whom trad med folks just assume are middle of the road moderates that both parties must vie for in general elections by leaning to the center, wherever that it.
I think this site has had plenty of diaries that have shredded that nonsense. Especially in this election, most folks line up on one side or the other, There are very few truly undecided, skip-the-labels, weigh-the-message-of-each-candidate types.
This is about scientists figuring a way to unmask the reluctant partisans who claim no labels.
Okay, you may not think that's fun. I do. As an undergrad, I was a frequent volunteer in Psych experiments, I got such a kick out of it. So imagine my reaction when I heard the promo today on NPR's Morning edition for such a story. I dropped what I was doing and listened attentively.
Full story here. But the executive summary is that most who talk the talk of no labels do not actually walk the walk. As an example they present a fellow named Amin Sadri, who claims no partisanship though he admits he voted democratic or will vote that way for President, Senate and/or house or reps going back to 2004. When called on it, Sadri says:
"See, that's the problem," he said. "As soon as I say that I'm a Democrat, people look at me and say, 'Oh, you believe in this, you believe in this, you believe in this,' and I don't!"
Enter Brian Nosek:
Brian Nosek is a psychologist at the University of Virginia. Along with graduate student Carlee Beth Hawkins, Nosek studies why people don't always do what they say they want to do — why there is a gap in many aspects of human behavior between what people intend to do and what they actually do.
Nosek and Hawkins believed this disconnect explains why many independents aren't independent when it comes to voting.
They've studied it enough to design a test that's pretty darned good at sussing out what party an "independent" really leans to, or if they really do not lean.
"The test is called the Implicit Association Test," Nosek said. "And it's been used for a variety of different topics — trying to measure people's racial attitudes, their anxieties about spiders, their self-esteem. In our case, we tried to measure how strongly people associate themselves with Democrats or Republicans."
I took a few versions of the
test. (It's fun. Go on and try it!) The gist is the test asks you to categorize words with people or ideas. You have to go as fast as you can and correct any mistakes you make. Then they change things up on you and ask you to reverse those associations and again go as fast as you can. I think it uses the delay in answering the questions and the errors you make to determine which of the associations are natural to you and which your brain strains to make.
Surprisingly to me, I only had a slight implicit association with Dems, even though I identify as a Dem and have not voted for a Republican for 30 years, if ever. I did have a strong implicit association with Barack Obama as opposed to George Bush though. Racially it said I had a moderate implicit association with Black people over white.
Anyway, it's fun. Check it out. You can waste a lot of time on the site taking tests.
The psychologists are publishing their study in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.