“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.
The researchers questioned voters using the “Five Factor Model” which consists of five broad personality traits – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. They also considered the disposition of authoritarianism (it is not considered a personality trait). Authoritarians have a more black and white view of the world around them, are more concerned with the upkeep of established societal traditions and have a tendency to be less accepting of outsiders.
So what did they uncover? Participants expressing an intent to vote to leave the EU reported significantly higher levels of authoritarianism and conscientiousness, and lower levels of openness and neuroticism than voters expressing an intent to vote to remain. (Conscientiousness is associated with dependability, dutifulness, focus and adherence to societal norms in contrast to disorganisation, carelessness and impulsivity.)
Immigration in particular seems to have affected voting. While authoritarians were much more likely to vote Leave to begin with, those who were less authoritarian became increasingly likely to vote Leave if they expressed high levels of concern over immigration. These findings chime with research by the Professors Marc Hetherington and Elizabeth Suhay, which found that Americans became susceptible to “authoritarian thinking” when they perceived a grave threat to their safety.
Then there’s what you might call the £350m question – did Leave voters know what they were voting for? When the Online Privacy Foundation researchers compared Leave voters with Remain voters, they displayed significantly lower levels of numeracy, reasoning and appeared more impulsive. In all three areas, older voters performed significantly worse than young voters intending to vote the same way.
Even when voters were able to interpret statistics, their ability to do so could be overcome by partisanship. In one striking study, when voters were asked to interpret statistics about whether a skin cream increases or decreases a rash, they were able to interpret them correctly roughly 57 per cent of the time. But when voters were asked to interpret the same set of statistics, but told they were about whether immigration increases or decreases crime, something disturbing happened.
If the statistics didn’t support a voter’s view, their ability to correctly interpret the numbers dropped, in some cases, by almost a half.
Before Remoaners start to crow, this study is not an affirmation that “I’m smart, you’re dumb”. Further research could be done, for example, on the role of age and education (young graduates were far more likely to vote Remain). But in the meantime, there is a question that needs to be answered – are political campaigners deliberately exploiting these personality traits?
Chris Sumner, from the Online Privacy Foundation, warns that in the era of Big Data, clues about our personalities are collected online: “In the era of Big Data, these clues are aggregated, transformed and sold by a burgeoning industry.”
Indeed, Cambridge Analytica, a data company associated with the political right in the UK and US, states on its website that it can “more effectively engage and persuade voters using specially tailored language and visual ad combinations crafted with insights gleaned from behavioral understandings of your electorate”. It will do so through a “blend of big data analytics and behavioural psychology”.
“Given the differences observed between Leave and Remain voters, and irrespective of which campaign, it is reasonable to hypothesize that industrial-scale psychographic profiling would have been a highly effective strategy,” Sumner says. By identifying voters with different personalities and attitudes, such campaigns could target “the most persuadable voters with messages most likely to influence their vote”. Indeed, in research yet to be published, the Online Privacy Foundation targeted groups with differing attitudes to civil liberties based on psychographic indicators associated with authoritarianism. The findings, says Sumner, illustrate “the ease with which individuals’ inherent differences could be exploited”.
Content from our partners
Related
