Will you vote to remain in the EU on 23 June, or could you be convinced by Boris Johnson and his posse that Britain should leave? After much debate about the wording of the referendum question, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ were eschewed for ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ to avoid any unconscious bias in the polling booth.
It’s correct to assume that different words trigger different associations in the brain. Yet even those who feel convinced of their position may be surprised at just how suggestible they really are.
In one experiment, German researchers asked a group of undergraduates to rate how happy they were on a scale of one to 10. They then asked them how many dates they’d had in the previous six months. There was no correlation between the two numbers. Then they asked exactly the same two questions to a different group of undergraduates, but in the opposite order. This time there was a strong link between how many dates a student had been on and how highly they rated their happiness.
So beware of psychological tricks used by either side in the debate. They may be more powerful than you think.
Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London
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