You’re more likely to vote if you think someone will ask you about it later

(credit: flickr user: hjl)

When people think they’re being watched, they’re more inclined to behave themselves. This behavior pops up again and again: in blood donation, energy saving, and charitable giving. There are many explanations for why this happens—maybe we think people are more likely to treat us well if they see us behaving in a prosocial way; in some cases, we might behave ourselves in front of others in order to avoid awkward conversations or having to lie.

Harvard researchers Todd Rogers, John Ternovski, and Erez Yoeli wanted to find out if they could leverage this tendency in order to increase voter turnout. A “get-out-the-vote” (GOTV) letter is a simple, impersonal reminder that has a small but noticeable effect on voter turnout. A meta-analysis of 79 experiments on the effects of GOTV letters found that, on average, they boosted turnout by 0.194 percentage points—for example, from 39 percent to 39.194 percent.

It’s a tiny figure, but if applied across the US, it would result in around 450,000 extra voters (out of an estimated 235,248,000 eligible voters). Not nothing, but still not a lot. Rogers, Ternovski, and Yoeli suspected that adding a hint of oversight to the letters could make a bigger difference.

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