Do Subtle Linguistic Interventions Priming a Social Identity as a Voter Have Outsized Effects on Voter Turnout? Evidence From a New Replication Experiment

Abstract

An ongoing debate in political psychology is about whether small wording differences have outsized behavioral effects. A leading example is whether subtle linguistic cues embedded in voter mobilization messages dramatically increase turnout. An initial study analyzing two small-scale field experiments argued that describing someone as a voter (noun) instead of one who votes (verb) increases turnout rates 11 to 14 points because the noun activates a person's social identity as a voter. A subsequent study analyzing a large-scale field experiment challenged this claim and found no effect. But questions about the initial claim's domain of applicability persist. The subsequent study may not have reproduced the conditions necessary for the psychological phenomenon to occur, specifically the electoral contexts were not competitive or important enough for the social identity to matter. To address the first of these critiques, as well as other potential explanations for different results between the first two studies, we conduct a large-scale replication field experiment. We find no evidence that this minor wording change increases turnout levels. This research provides new evidence that the strategy of invoking the self does not appear to consistently increase turnout and calls into question whether subtle linguistic cues have outsized behavioral effects.An ongoing debate in political psychology is about whether small wording differences have outsized effects on behavior. A leading example is whether subtle linguistic cues that link a desired behavior to a person's social identity are able to induce dramatic behavioral change by priming that identity. Specifically, the argument is that describing a person using a predicate noun (e.g., "to be a voter") emphasizes a behavior as an attribute of one's social identity that one can claim by engaging in that behavior. In contrast to describing a person's potential behavior using a verb (e.g., "to vote"), the theory argues that the use of a predicate noun introduces a subtle linguistic cue that more clearly primes the behavior as related to one's identity, increasing the likelihood that the person engages in it. 0162-895X

Replicator degrees of freedom allow publication of misleading failures to replicate

“…A closer examination of the analyses reported by Gerber et al (35) in support of their claim of nonreplication revealed that the replicating authors chose to include 3 features in all of their reported models that in combination are known to increase the risk of misleading results. They are the inclusion of a large number of covariates, substantial collinearity among covariates, and the inclusion of interaction terms.…”

“…Here, we provide stronger evidence than that. We show that, when the replicating investigators (i.e., independent researchers who are on record as being skeptical of the original effect) conduct a second replication test (35) that corrects a material deviation from the design of the original studies (18, 23, 33), they successfully replicate the original finding. The replicating investigators’ choice, in this case, to address the original authors’ context-based critique in a second replication study affords a rare opportunity to assess whether correcting such a contextual deviation can result in a successful replication.…”

“…Roughly 2 y after the debate over the first replication test, Gerber et al (35) published a second replication test conducted in the context of 4 relatively high-profile elections, correcting the first replication test’s most serious deviation from the original experimental context. The most obvious of a number of remaining deviations from the original design in this second replication test (Table 1) was that it was conducted over 4 d—beginning 3 d before Election Day and ending when polls closed on Election Day.…”

“…This paper presents a reanalysis of the data from the second replication test (35). § It is prompted by our observation that nowhere in that 2018 paper do the replicating authors report a test of the most straightforward, direct replication of the original experiments: was there an effect of noun wording on turnout among people who participated either the day before or early the morning of Election Day?…”

Implicit attitudes and the ability argument

“…Longitudinal studies find that individual differences in explicit measures are more stable over time than implicit measures are (Gawronski et al 2017). Research casts doubt on social priming (Gerber et al 2017;Pashler et al 2012) or the reality of power posing (Jonas et al 2017). And research questions the degree to which intelligence mindsets (Bahník and Vranka 2017) or stereotype threat (Finnigan and Corker 2016;Flore and Wicherts 2015) explain performance outcomes.…”