“Before referendum day, I said the winners would be those who told the most convincing lies,” Paul Flynn, a Labour MP, wrote in these pages. “Leave did.” The idea that those who voted for Brexit were somehow manipulated is widely accepted by the Remain camp. The Leave campaign, so the argument goes, played on voters’ fears and exploited their low numeracy. And new research from the Online Privacy Foundation suggests this argument may, in part at least, be right.
Over the last 18 months the organisation have researched differences in personality traits, levels of authoritarianism, numeracy, thinking styles and cognitive biases between EU referendum voters. The organisation conducted a series of studies, capturing over 11,000 responses to self-report psychology questionnaires and controlled experiments, with the final results scheduled to be presented at the International Conference on Political Psychology in Copenhagen in October 2017.
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