By Bruce Bower
No man or woman is an island, not even in that sacrosanct chamber of democracy known as the ballot box. That’s because the nature of an assigned polling place can, without people knowing, sway how they vote — enough to swing a close election, a new study indicates.
In a 2000 statewide election in Arizona, a greater proportion of people who voted at schools supported a school-funding initiative than did people who voted at churches or other polling places, say marketing professor Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleagues. The researchers statistically controlled for a variety of factors that might have affected this finding, which they report online June 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A follow-up experiment conducted online found that people more often supported a school-funding initiative if they had just seen images of school settings during an ostensibly unrelated task, as opposed to images of office buildings and other structures. Participants reported no awareness of the school images having influenced their support for the initiative.