Davis, Colin and Memon, Amina (2011) Social Influence in Televised Election Debates: A Potential Distortion of Democracy. PLoS One, 6 (3). pp. . ISSN 1932-6203
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A recent innovation in televised election debates is a continuous response measure (commonly referred to as the ‘‘worm’’) that allows viewers to track the response of a sample of undecided voters in real-time. A potential danger of presenting such data is that it may prevent people from making independent evaluations. We report an experiment with 150 participants in which we manipulated the worm and superimposed it on a live broadcast of a UK election debate. The majority of viewers were unaware that the worm had been manipulated, and yet we were able to influence their perception of who won the debate, their choice of preferred prime minister, and their voting intentions. We argue that there is an urgent need to reconsider the simultaneous broadcast of average response data with televised election debates.
This is a Published version This version's date is: 30/03/2011 This item is peer reviewed
https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/5a4152bf-a9ee-c69b-78ea-971016ef417b/1/
Deposited by () on 13-Apr-2011 in Royal Holloway Research Online.Last modified on 13-Apr-2011
Copyright: 2011 Davis et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permitsunrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.