BARACK OBAMA or John McCain? Floating voters in the upcoming US election may already have made up their minds 鈥� they just don鈥檛 know it yet.
Bertram Gawronski, a social psychologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and his colleagues asked 129 residents of Vicenza, Italy, whether they would support a controversial proposal to enlarge the city鈥檚 US military base. To measure subconscious biases, the team used an 鈥渋mplicit association鈥� test to record, for example, whether volunteers associated pictures of the base with positive words such as 鈥渏oy鈥� or negative ones such as 鈥減ain鈥�.
When polled a week later, many who were undecided about the base in the first poll had resolved to support or oppose it 鈥� and the team found that their decision could be predicted by their responses on the association test (Science, vol 321, p 1100).
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Though not a perfect science, such testing may be of interest to pollsters looking to improve their election forecasts.
