Thursday, July 21, 2011

I guess there won't be many US Flags displayed at the Democratic Convention next year:

Amazing.  Just seeing the United States flag increases the probablilty of voting Republican - even 8 months later!
Just a brief exposure to an image of the American flag shifts voters, even Democrats, to Republican beliefs, attitudes and voting behavior even though most don't believe it will impact their politics, according to a new two-year study just published in the scholarly Psychological Science.
What's more, according to three authors from the University Chicago, Cornell University and Hebrew University, the impact had staying power.
"A single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants' Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting 8 months," the study found. "These results constitute the first evidence that nonconscious priming effects from exposure to a national flag can bias the citizenry toward one political party and can have considerable durability."
[See the month's best editorial cartoons.]
Theirs is the first study to look at the political impact on Americans who have seen an American flag, and it seems to back up another recent Harvard University professor's study that found that kids who attended a July 4th parade ended up leaning Republican when they grew up.
It's also sure to prompt GOP presidential candidates to add more U.S. flags at their events and speeches.
For this study, the scholars asked mostly Democratic-leaning voters to join in the survey conducted just before the 2008 election of President Obama over Sen. John McCain. All were given a survey to fill out. Half of those surveys included a small picture of an American flag in the top left corner.
Some 90 percent said that they believed their voting behavior wouldn't be influenced by the presence of a flag.
But after asking how the participants voted, the study concluded:
"In contrast to the beliefs of the participants in the pilot study, the results from the experiments reported here show that exposure to the American flag introduces a bias toward the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. In one experiment, we tested whether subtle exposure to the American flag shifted people's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors toward the Republican end of the political continuum. We found that a single exposure to a small American flag during deliberation about voting intentions prior to a general election led to significant and robust changes in participants' voting intentions, voting behavior, and political attitudes, all in the politically conservative direction."
 Read the entire article here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's really good information to have. Now if we could just let all the conservatives know that they should fly their flags at home and on their vehicles, they we should have our flags somewhere at every gathering we might just save our country after all.