The Art of Peer Pressure: Where's Your "I Voted" Sticker?

Nov. 4, 2016 - PRLog -- How do you convince others to follow your lead? That's the question election officials have been asking since the dawn of democracy. The importance of voting seems self-evident; yet, voter turnout in the United Stated typically hovers around 55% for presidential elections and a dismal 35% in the mid-terms.

Since we aren't going to mandate voting, like some other countries, we need a technique that exerts pressure to participate in our government. Taking bribery off the table (it leads to corruption) and coercion (it leads to tyranny), there is an effective research-proven method that many States already use—appealing to people's social standing, aka their vanity.

A study by four researchers at Harvard, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago found that a key motivator to vote is that we enjoy telling others we voted. In the experiment, homeowners were notified that the researchers would show up after the election to conduct a survey on their participation. It turned out that people were significantly more likely to...

Read more at: www.leadersayswhat.com/2016/11/the-art-of-peer-pressure-wheres-your-i-voted-sticker