Fear and loathing in Des Moines

The letter sent to people who had not voted in recent elections showed people their ‘score’ and their neighbors’ scores based on past voting record. For added social pressure, the letter mentions that neighbors may see your score and that a follow-up letter may be issued after the election.

The letter caused an outrage on twitter with some even going on to ‘punish’ Cruz by professing support for Trump.

The interesting part was that Cruz’s campaign modeled their letters on ones drafted in a 2008 study that studied how social pressure affected voter turn out. Cruz’ letter was not far off from the most successful letter (an 8.1% lift over the baseline of 29.7% voting rate) in the study that also used voters’ and neighbors’ voting history combined with possibility of a post-election follow-up letter.

So how do we get from the nice 8.1% lift to this backlash? The answer lies in ‘context’ – insights from studies have to be contextualized for the situation or risk such failure. Though Larimer also got complaints from voters because the study, the reaction to the study may well have been muted because an independent agent with no vested interest in the election outcome was running it. Larimer, in an email to Washington Post blames the negative tone of the letter for triggering a ‘boomerang effect’. What he overlooks is that as long as the letter states “Paid for by Cruz for President”, the causal attribution for the situation would fall on Cruz (and not ‘self’, which is required for shame) and the emotion elicited may be anger rather than shame.

Image credit: Braddock Massey on Twitter

#behavioralscience #context #elections #tedcruz