The Self-Prophecy Effect : Increasing Voter Turnout by Vanity-Assisted Consciousness Raising

Persons registered to vote in Seattle, Washington for the November, 1986 general election and a September, 1987 primary election were randomly assigned to treatments in two telephoneconducted experiments that sought to increase voter turnout. The experiments applied and extended a "self-prophecy" technique, in which respondents are asked simply to predict whether or not they will perform a target action. In the present studies, voting registrants were asked to predict whether or not they would vote in an election that was less than 48 hours away. This technique, which previously increased turnout in a small study done during the 1984 US. Presidential election, was again effective among moderate prior-turnout voters in the second of the present much larger experiments. The failure of the effect in Experiment 1 was plausibly a ceiling effect due to very high turnout for a US. Senate contest in the 1986 election. Successful applications of the selfprophecy technique are facilitated by social desirability of the target action (which leads subjects to predict that they will perform it). However, social desirability of the target behavior is not a sufficient condition for the effect, as indicated by an unexpected nonoccurrence of the effect among low prior-turnout voters in Experiment 2. Date of draft: September 26, 1988 The authors are grateful to Robert P. Abelson and Daniel Kahneman for comments on a previous draft. Address correspondence to: Anthony G. Greenwald, Department of Psychology NI-25, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195. RUNNING H E A D : Increasing Voter Turnout Increasing voter turnout (September 26, 1988) The Self-Prophecy Effect: Increasing Voter Turnout by Vanity-Assisted Consciousness Raising When asked to predict their behavior, college students overstate their likelihood of performing socially desirable actions. Although this is not surprising, it is remarkable that, once predicted, the socially desirable action is more likely to occur. In a study done with students on the Indiana University campus, Sherman (1980) demonstrated this phenomenon's use to increase the rate of volunteering to do charitable work, and Greenwald, Carnot, Beach and Young (1987) increased voter turnout in the 1984 U.S. Presidential election among a small sample of dormitory-resident students on the Ohio State University campus. Sherman (1980) labeled this type of finding a serf-erasing error of prediction, because (a) subjects predicted a higher rate of performing the desirable action than was observed in a control group that made no predictions, but (b) the increased subsequent performance of the action made the (apparent) errors of overprediction not (or less) erroneous. A plausible interpretation of the effect assumes that the subject wishes to project a favorable appearance, and consequently predicts performance (rather than nonperformance) of the target action. The forecast then becomes a self-fuKlling prophecy, perhaps as a consequence of the subject's subsequently retrieving the prediction and using it as a guide to action. (Theoretical interpretation of the effect is considered further in the concluding Discussion.) In this article, serf-prophecy effect is used as a shorthand label for the self-erasing-error-of-prediction phenomenon described by Sherman. In the present two experiments, which are based on the procedures of Greenwald et al. (1987), potential voters were asked to predict whether or not they would vote in an imminent election. These experiments sought to demonstrate that the selfprophecy effect could be applied to produce the practically important effect of increasing voter turnout in a nonstudent population. Because of the generally very high voter turnout in the election on which it focused, Experiment 1 turned out not to provide an effective test of the self-prophecy effect, and will be reported only brieflY.l Experiment 2, which was done in a a primary election that attracted considerably less turnout, provided a more decisive test which both confirmed the self-prophecy effect and revealed a previously unsuspected limiting condition.