Welcome to brain Stuff, production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren voge Obam here. Our podcast headquarters are in Atlanta, Georgia. Where as of this publication, we recently had a Senate runoff election, which got us thinking once again about the power of the democratic process and of the now ubiquitous I Voted sticker. Voting sticker selfies started going viral on Twitter and Instagram during the election and are now so popular that people who vote absentee feel
like they're missing out. Artists around the country have been offering I Voted designs for printing at home during this election season. There's even a guy in New Jersey determined to send a sticker to every person who voted by mail. But as inconsequential as stickers might seem, our obsession with them makes perfect sense to social science researchers who study voter turnout and what motivates people to go to the polls. Old scivic duty is definitely a strong incentive, but so
is social status. We spoke with Stefano Della Vigna, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the study voting to tell others one of many fascinating studies proving that we vote in part because we want our friends and neighbors to know that we voted. His study notes that it's a long established fact that of non voters lie to pollsters when asked if they
voted in the last election. He said, on its face, this indicates that people hate to admit to being non voters. They face this trade off between telling the truth and looking bad or lying. Most people prefer others to see them as voters. It's one thing to lie to a stranger with a clipboard, but how much harder is it to lie to a friend or family member who asks
if you voted. It's that expectation of being asked and the cost of lying to someone you know that could motivate and on the fence voter to go out and cast a ballot. Della Vignia calculates that the potential public shame of not voting is enough to boost voter participation by two to three percentage points in a tile election such as the runoffs here in Georgia. That can be huge. So how do those stickers play into all of this?
When you slap a voting sticker on your chest, you're sending two clear messages to the other members of your social network. The first message, obviously, is that I voted. You're essentially answering the question before it's even asked. The second message is implied, but just as strong. Della Vignia said, if you see people wearing the sticker on election day, you might think, oh, geez, my grandma is going to ask me whether I voted. If you're on the fence,
that might be enough to push you over. Delavignia study is not the only research that backs up the sneaky power of the I voted sticker. A landmark Swiss study back in two thousand five studied voter participation before and after a new law allowing voting by mail. This was government expected voter turnout to increase if voters were given the easier option of voting from home. Instead, voter turnout
actually dropped, especially in smaller towns. Patricia Funk, an author of the Swiss study, wrote, as long as poll voting was the only option, there was an incentive or pressure to go to the polls only to be seen handing in the vote. Since in small communities people know each other better and gossip about who fulfills civic duties and who doesn't. The benefits of norm adherents were particularly high in this type of community, but when vote by mail
became an option, the pressure to publicly vote decreased. People could just as easily lie and say that they voted from home. Voting stickers have been around since, but started to gain popularity during the tight year two thousand Bush Gore race with its disputed outcome. Social media has taken
this colorful representation of voting to another level. Not every jurisdiction does offer stickers, though at fifteen cents a pop, the cost can add up when ordering for thousands or millions, but it might be worth it if voter participation increases. Facebook experimented with a clickable I Voted button with somewhat amazing results. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego tested different versions of the button on sixty one million
Facebook users. When those Facebook users were shown six profile pictures of friends who had already voted, they were two point zero eight percent more likely to click the I Voted button themselves versus those users who only received the information encouraging voting but no pictures of friends. Of course, stickers aren't going to solve wider issues of voter suppression, but hopefully they can be part of convincing people to get out to the polls every time there's a local vote,
and that every vote really does count. Yeah. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this lots of other topics, visit house stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.