Written in 2017 for a University of Colorado course.
Despite the increased voter turnout rate, a bump of 3.2 percentage points, from 45.1 to 48.3 percent, college students still turn out in significantly lower numbers than any other age group (National Public Radio). Millennials are referred to as the percentage of the population from 18 to 35 years old as of 2016 (Khalid, 2016). Millennials now rival Baby Boomers in terms of numbers, which could significantly affect the outcome of elections if they were to turn out and vote. The problem is that they don’t. And this is not a new trend. Over the years, turnout has always been consistently low among young people when compared to other, older groups. The question then becomes how to address this problem and get college age students to show up to the polls. We know from our study of the Theory of Affective Intelligence that anger makes people pay attention to things that they normally wouldn’t and show up, so in order to get people to turn out to vote, you need to make them angry or enthusiastic. This tactic is commonly seen during election season when politicians run negative ads in order to make their opponent seem frightening. However, with less and less people watching actual television and more people switching to online platforms that don’t have commercials, anger had to be created in a new way. Another way to increase voter turnout among college students is to create commitments. This kind of nudge is used by voter registration groups by asking how you’re going to vote rather than just if you’re voting. By asking how someone is voting, you create a commitment in their mind and they are more likely to actually vote. However, these people are often avoided when walking to class. Creating class time set aside to register to vote (or giving extra credit to those who vote) would create an even more powerful commitment and encourage students to turn out. Finally, we found out from the postcard experiment we talked about in lecture that social pressure can play a large role in the behavior of people. People are highly susceptible to social norms so in order to try to get college students to vote, we have to make voting a social norm.
How do you tap in to the emotions of college students and use them to your advantage?And how do you get your message to them? College students are increasingly abandoning traditional forms of media like television and radio, where negative political ads would normally appear in favor of platforms like Netflix and Hulu that allow you to watch content without seeing any commercials. Even platforms like YouTube are not entirely effective in delivering ad messages because they can often be skipped after five seconds. In fact, during this past election season, since I wasn’t at home with a real TV, I don’t think I saw a single political commercial like I have in past years. Instead of relying on traditional media, if we want to increase voter turnout among college students, we have to adapt to the kind of social media that they use. For example, if negative political ads are displayed in between posts on Instagram, college students would be much more likely to see them and therefore respond emotionally to them. According to the Theory of Affective Intelligence, there are two systems within the theory that help predict how people will act according to emotions. The disposition system deals with enthusiasm and anger. With both familiar and unfamiliar situations, people using this system do not change their behavior because they either know they don’t like something and therefore don’t do research (enthusiasm) or they know they don’t like something, and therefore also don’t do research (anger). The other system, the surveillance system, helps with learning by making people anxious. Although anxiety increases interest and learning, it does not make people show up to vote. In order to increase voter turnout, we have to take advantage of the disposition system. Angry or enthusiastic people people will be more likely to show up to the polls because they either don’t like something so much that they are willing to make other sacrifices in their day to day life to make sure they can vote or they are so excited about a candidate or ballot initiative that they show up to support that. In the case of the 2016 presidential election, we saw that this was the case as well. People either hated Trump so much that they voted to try to make sure that he didn’t get elected or they were so excited at the prospect of the first female president that they showed up to support Clinton. However, from personal experience, I found that anger was a more salient factor in whether or not people voted. By showing negative ads that evoke feelings of anger toward a candidate, college students will be more fired up about elections and therefore turn out to try to stop a candidate from being elected. The negative ads need to be eye-catching enough to make people stop scrolling for long enough to look at them. Bright colors or images of a dystopian society (aka what would happen if our opponent is elected) would be shocking enough to capture the attention of college students and create anger. A possible drawback to this strategy is that millennial will simply ignore the ad messages like they ignore other ads they see on social media. What makes these ads different than the other ones that just get scrolled past? I argue that many college age students want to get involved and vote but don’t have the information accessible to them to do so. If we come up with creative enough designs, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that many college age students would take a minute to look at an ad. And if they do, by the Theory of Affective Intelligence, their voter turnout is more likely to increase. Another possible criticism of this tactic is that it makes the campaign we’re supporting look too negative and may alienate voters that are undecided. I think that is a risk we have to take because it will result in more votes than if we were to just rely on positive ads and hope that makes people enthusiastic enough to vote.
Once anger is created among college students, what can we do to help them channel their anger into votes? Voter registration organizations are somewhat effective in helping people get registered to vote but often times these people are avoided or brushed off by students walking to class. Even though the registration process takes a very short amount of time, for many students, it is seen as an inconvenience or too much of a time commitment. In order to combat this, professors teaching introduction level classes should set aside a day in class to help students register to vote because of the reasons people cite for not voting, the registration process is one of the most common. By setting aside this time, we are creating a commitment among college students. Once they are registered to vote, there are very few other things that could hold them back from showing up to vote or sending in their ballot. This follows the same logic that the voter registration groups use. Instead of asking “Are you voting?” they ask “How are you voting?” so people have to come up with an answer. Once they answer, they then have a plan for how they will vote and are more likely to actually do so. This tactic also needs to be executed in a way that ensures students will not just leave or not show up to class that day. First, students should not be told that they will be registering in class or they may not show up. Of course, students shouldn’t be forced to register to vote, but again, if there is class time set aside for it, they are more likely to do it than if it were on their own time. This tactic is similar to getting students to fill out FCQ’s at the end of every semester, no one really wants to take the time to do it but it ends up helping everyone in the end. Unlike FCQ’s however, the voter registration time in class should be at the beginning of the period, not at the end, so people don’t just leave without doing it. If time is set aside in the beginning of class, many more students are likely to participate because they are already in class and have at least fifty minutes until they have to be somewhere else. Students could simply fill out the voter registration sheet, hand it in and then move on to classwork once everyone is done. Again, creating this small commitment will help increase voter turnout because the registration process is one of the things that holds people back from voting. Once you’re registered to vote, very little effort is required of you do follow through on voting. Of course this will not guarantee 100% voter registration of eligible voters enrolled in college and some students may refuse to do it but overall, creating an allotted time to register students to vote in class will greatly increase the voter turnout rate of college age students because of the commitment it creates. One counter-argument of this tactic is that it makes something that is normally voluntary now obligatory. Students obviously wouldn’t be forced to do something they don’t want to do but I think of this tactic as similar to the automatic voter registration that some people have suggested. You don’t have to vote but if you’re automatically registered or if you have the time to do it in class, it makes your ability to vote much easier if you decide to show up to the polls. Professors could even incentivize students to vote more by offering extra credit in class if they do vote. This also wouldn’t make voting mandatory but would strongly encourage students to practice more productive civil behavior.
Finally, we saw in lecture that appeals to social norms can be very powerful. The example we talked about also had to do with voting and if we could increase voter turnout by applying social pressure to voters. Of the postcards that were sent out in the study, we saw more of an increase in voter turnout among the people who received a more aggressive postcard that told them if their neighbors turned out to vote or not. Since people didn’t want to be seen as the neighbor who doesn’t vote, there was an increase of 8% among the people who received this postcard (Social Pressures Slides). It is still the case that college students care what their peers think of them, perhaps even more so than older couples who live in suburban neighborhoods. Since voting records are public, one way to increase social pressure, would be to post flyers with links to websites where students can see if their friends or roommates have voted. However, since college students often aren’t old enough to have a long voting history record, other social pressure methods have to be utilized. We could tell students that we will be publishing a list of people who voted so everyone will know if they voted or not. I think many students think of voting as the right thing to do, they just have things that get in the way of following though or don’t have the motivation to do so. But on a campus like CU Boulder, where it is the “cool” thing to do to vote, the possibility of people knowing that you didn’t vote may invoke a fear of being looked down upon by your peers. This tactic may be criticized for being a little manipulative but in the end, we’re not going to publicize who students voted for, just whether or not they voted, and that information is public record. Another way to use social pressure to increase voter turnout, that might be a little unethical, would be to stretch the truth and tell students that a certain percentage of their peers have already voted and that if they haven’t, they’re in the minority. Obviously since less than half of college age registered voters actually vote, we know that this isn’t true. But to someone who doesn’t know these statistics, being told that they are one of the few people who hasn’t voted, that may be enough to pressure or shame them into voting. We saw in the experiment we talked about in class that adults are susceptible to social pressures like the prospect of shame and that experimenters were able to take advantage of this and use it to get them to vote more in elections. If this is the case for adults, I think the possibility of this method working for younger people who tend to care more about what their peers think of them is much higher and will therefore result in an increase in voter turnout among college students. Again, this tactic may be seen as manipulative or unethical because we are trying to shame students into voting, but there’s nothing illegal going on here, we’re just playing up social pressure in order to encourage college age people to vote.
Based on what we’ve learned about psychology and politics, we’ve found that people can often be manipulated by using methods in psychology in order to help them make better political decisions, specifically the decision to vote. College students are no exception to this trend from numerous examples we have talked about in class that illustrate the ways to increase voter turnout. Based on these class discussions, one of the ways to increase voter turnout is to increase anger among people. The Theory of Affective Intelligence tells us that anxiety increases learning and interest among citizens but anger and enthusiasm increase voter turnout. In order to accomplish this, we plan to create negative ads that evoke anger among college students on social media platforms. Another way to increase voter turnout among college students is to create commitments. In order to do this, we will have professors teaching introduction level classes set aside class time to register students to vote to eliminate the time commitment outside of class and remove the barrier that stops many people from voting. With the registration process out of the way, students will be more likely to show up to the polls and vote. Professors can also offer extra credit to students to vote to further increase the incentive to vote. Finally, one of the most powerful tactics in psychology in the way of making people act in the way you want is social pressure. We saw that social pressure is able to increase voter turnout among older citizens, so the same should be true among college students, perhaps even more so because college age students tend to care more about what their peers think of them than adults do. We plan to apply social pressure in order to increase voter turnout by publishing voter records (which are public record) and telling students that they are in a minority of students that haven’t voted yet in order to further pressure them into voting. We believe that either one or a combination of these proposed tactics will help increase voter turnout among college students by nudging them in the right direction using psychology rather than just yelling at them to vote.
Works Cited
Khalid, A. (2016, May 16). Millennials Now Rival Boomers As A Political Force, But Will They
Actually Vote? Retrieved November 09, 2017, from http://www.npr.org/
2016/05/16/478237882/millennials-now-rival-boomers-as-a-political-force-but-will-
they-actually-vote.
Kurtzleben, D. (2017, September 20). 2016 Voter Turnout Dropped At HBCUs, Climbed At
Women's Colleges, Study Finds. Retrieved November 09, 2017, from http://
at-women-s-colleges-study-finds.
Wolak, Jennifer. Lecture slides. PSCI 4221.
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