Increasing voting behavior by asking people if they expect to vote
Greenwald, Carnot, Beach and Young ran two telephone experiments with Ohio State University students in autumn 1984. A registration experiment with 62 unregistered students found a gap of about ten percentage points between students asked to predict and a control group, in the predicted direction and not statistically significant. In a voting experiment on the Monday evening before the 6 November election, 32 students in the prediction group all said they expected to vote, and between 81 and 88 per cent of them voted against 57 to 64 per cent of 28 control students, depending on how the records were counted. The authors drew on Sherman's idea of self-erasing errors of prediction and suggested the effect might be larger for more socially desirable behaviours.
Greenwald, Carnot, Beach and Young ran two telephone experiments with Ohio State University students in autumn 1984. A registration experiment with 62 unregistered students found a gap of about ten percentage points between students asked to predict and a control group, in the predicted direction and not statistically significant. In a voting experiment on the Monday evening before the 6 November election, 32 students in the prediction group all said they expected to vote, and between 81 and 88 per cent of them voted against 57 to 64 per cent of 28 control students, depending on how the records were counted. The authors drew on Sherman's idea of self-erasing errors of prediction and suggested the effect might be larger for more socially desirable behaviours.
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Greenwald, A. G., Carnot, C. G., Beach, R., & Young, B. (1987). Increasing voting behavior by asking people if they expect to vote. Journal of Applied Psychology, 72(2), 315-318. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.72.2.315 https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.72.2.315