Monday, November 3, 2014

Undecided Voters Need Their Head Examined

You may have seen a recent article about researchers predicting if a person is liberal or conservative based on their reaction to "disturbing" (i.e. gross) images.  Despite what you're likely thinking, it's not that one side was more disturbed by the images than the other; actually, people's reaction to the images (and even their description of their reaction to them) didn't predict a person's ideology.  Instead, it was a scan of brain activity while the person looked at the pictures.  The different areas of the brain that were activated could be used to predict a person's political views with 95% accuracy.

There are a lot of interesting and controversial aspects to the story, but what I find interesting is the high accuracy of the scan.  It would seem to surpass other tests to predict a person's ideology, such as: annual income or church attendance.  More interestingly, it would likely be better than the test of simply asking the person what their ideology is. 

I, like most politically aware people, are constantly amazed at how many undecided people there are.  I can understand people being torn between two similar options they've narrowed it down to.  But there are always people who go into the election seriously claiming that they have no idea which of the diverse candidates they favour.  So those people have no idea what their political ideology is, but according to this paper, a brain scan could tell them.

No comments:

Post a Comment