Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
PLoS One. 2012;7(8):e44130. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044130. Epub 2012 Aug 29.
The prediction of voting behavior of undecided voters poses a challenge to psychologists and pollsters. Recently, researchers argued that implicit attitudes would predict voting behavior particularly for undecided voters whereas explicit attitudes would predict voting behavior particularly for decided voters. We tested this assumption in two studies in two countries with distinct political systems in the context of real political elections. Results revealed that (a) explicit attitudes predicted voting behavior better than implicit attitudes for both decided and undecided voters, and (b) implicit attitudes predicted voting behavior better for decided than undecided voters. We propose that greater elaboration of attitudes produces stronger convergence between implicit and explicit attitudes resulting in better predictive validity of both, and less incremental validity of implicit over explicit attitudes for the prediction of voting behavior. However, greater incremental predictive validity of implicit over explicit attitudes may be associated with less elaboration.
未做决定的选民的投票行为预测对心理学家和民意调查员来说是一个挑战。最近，研究人员认为，内隐态度将特别预测未做决定的选民的投票行为，而外显态度将特别预测已做决定的选民的投票行为。我们在两个具有不同政治制度的国家进行了两项研究，在真实的政治选举背景下检验了这一假设。结果表明：（a）在已做决定和未做决定的选民中，外显态度比内隐态度更能准确预测投票行为；（b）在已做决定的选民中，内隐态度比未做决定的选民更能准确预测投票行为。我们提出，态度的进一步阐述会使内隐和外显态度之间产生更强的一致性，从而提高两者的预测有效性，而内隐态度对投票行为的预测比外显态度具有更高的增量有效性。然而，内隐态度相对于外显态度的增量预测有效性可能与态度的简化程度有关。
