On Thursday the nation decides. Each one of us will be free to choose how or whether to vote. But if you've been paying any attention at all to the findings of modern psychology, you might doubt whether your vote is truly free at all.
There is a mass of compelling evidence that all our choices, including our electoral ones, are strongly affected by myriad unconscious and often irrational factors. For instance, you might think that stature in politics is moral rather than physical, but taller candidates consistently perform better than shorter ones in elections. One reason why David Cameron comes over as more prime ministerial in the opinion polls than Ed Miliband is that he is 6'1 while the Labour leader is 5'11.
And if you're still undecided when you enter the polling station, you might be swayed by where it is housed. People are more likely to support conservative parties if voting in a church and more likely to swing left if it is in a school or public library.
You might think that you listen to the arguments about policy and weigh them up, but in fact what sticks most in voters' minds are simple, emotional messages that are repeated and repeated. The Tories, for instance, are not so much trying to persuade people that voting Labour makes the “threat” of the SNP holding power more likely, as bashing people over the head with the idea so much that eventually it sticks and just seems like common sense.
These and many more research findings might make you despair. Hope, however, can be found lurking in one of the most dispiriting studies of all. Psychologists Petter Johansson and Lars Hall asked people for their views on a range of subjects and later asked to explain why they hold them. The trick is that when they were “reminded” of what they reported they believed, they were told the opposite of what they had actually said. An astonishingly high proportion then simply justified the opinion they were falsely told they held. Johansson and Hall call this effect “choice blindness.”
The final days of the election in pictures:
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If it seems incredible that people can be made to flip their positions 180° simply by being lied to, that's probably because you, a politically engaged Prospect reader, would not. The reason so many people do fall for this is that they don't have settled, thought-through views at all. When asked, they simply confabulate, inventing a position that appears to make sense to them at the time, as though it was what they always already believed. The deception doesn't work when people really mean what they say because they have thought about it already.
This is where the hope for true freedom in voting lies. The more we work at understanding the issues and thinking them through, the more we will arrive at opinions that have a real grounding in the issues and are not just a veneer for irrational prejudices. Our votes are free only to the extent that we work to make them truly our own, rather than allowing our judgements to be affected by the manipulations of others and irrational cognitive biases.
That does not mean that any of us are immune from distorting, unconscious influences, of course. If a free vote is one untainted by irrational factors then none of us are free. But freedom is not something we simply have or do not have. It is something we have more or less of. So to make our votes as free as possible we have to work on ourselves and use the findings of psychology not to feed cynicism, but to empower us to counter threats to freedom.
This view does however have disturbing implications for democracy. It suggests that you do not ensure a “free vote” simply by granting universal suffrage and holding “free and fair” elections. A genuinely free vote requires a genuinely free electorate, but we do not have this, since few keep themselves informed enough about both politics and psychology. There is no easy solution to this. A competence to vote test would be too easy to manipulate to suit vested interests and would likely disenfranchise the least advantaged. The best we can do is help as many people as possible to realise that really choosing requires really thinking. When the people are given the vote, the fight for complete political freedom is not won, but is only just beginning.
Julian Baggini will be speaking at How the Light Gets In, the world’s largest philosophy and music festival, running from 21st May to 31st May in association with Prospect Magazine.
