Voting With Your (Un)Consciousness

Research by Gavriel Knafo, doctoral student and adjunct professor, and Joel Weinberger, PhD, professor of psychology, is helping us understand how voters' unconscious perceptions are driving political outcomes, and exposing the illusion of political independence.

In 2016, Joel Weinberger, PhD, professor in the Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, and his research partner appeared on CNN'sAnderson Cooper 360º to discuss their predictions for the upcoming presidential election. They had been testing voters' unconscious perceptions of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which they believed would manifest in voting behavior at the polls, particularly among undecided voters. (Research has shown that committed main party voters are generally immoveable.) As Dr. Weinberger recounted in a later TEDx Talk, "what we said was, all the polls were wrong, all the pundits were wrong." There would be no landslide victory for Clinton, as most people predicted. In fact, she might not even win.

How did Dr. Weinberger get it right? "If you want to predict what people will do, you have to look at how the mind actually works, not what they say," he told Adelphi. "People's actions often betray something they can't identify." In their 2016 experiment, he and his research partner had asked 750 voters nationwide to associate a selection of attributes with Clinton and Trump. Neither was "likeable," but Clinton was most often associated with "scary" and "presidential," while Trump scored highest with "bigot" and "leader." These unconscious associations, Dr. Weinberger says, will predict behavior much more accurately than conscious thoughts.

In the decade since the 2016 election, the political playing field has become increasingly polarized. Disagreements reveal deep-seated differences in values, and ideological divides feel impossible to bridge. But Dr. Weinberger sees the same hidden forces that have always governed people's voting behavior. "Nothing psychologically has changed for the human mind," he said. "It's just that polls are still measuring voting behavior improperly. You can no longer ask people and trust what they tell you."

Do Third-Party Candidates Actually Move the Needle?

Now, Dr. Weinberger is back with a new piece of research on the unconscious mechanisms that influence voting behavior. For "The Illusion of Political Independence" (International Journal of Cognitive Sciences, December 2025), he supervised doctoral student of psychology Gavriel Knafo, the first author on the piece, as Knafo investigated a particular phenomenon in decision-making: the asymmetric dominance effect, also called the decoy effect.

"Asymmetric dominance is where you add a third option to an otherwise binary decision, and that shakes things up 'irrationally,'" Knafo explained. In political elections with a third-party candidate, can sway moderate voters between main party candidates, though not consciously; as previous studies have shown, the effect is context-dependent and unconsciously regulated. But these studies had also produced contradictory results. With a third-party candidate in the mix, sometimes a moderate voter's preference would swing toward the major party candidate that most resembled the third-party candidate, and sometimes it would swing away. Studies had also explored, separately, what happens when a third-party candidate enters a two-party race or when a third-party candidate drops out of the race. Yet no study had compared the two scenarios and sought to prove which would be more influential.

Knafo wanted to reconcile these ideas under a single framework. He designed a study that would not only articulate a "predictive mechanism for how third-party candidates influence voter preferences," as the paper notes, but also "measure the magnitude of asymmetric domination effects between two distinct scenarios."

Psychological Research Shows: A Candidate's Credibility Is Serious Business

Knafo's results centered around one variable that seemed to resolve previous contradictions: credibility. When study participants perceived a third-party candidate as a serious contender, they tended to prefer the more similar major party candidate, who then appeared to share positive attributes with the third-party candidate. An "unserious" third-party candidate, however, shifted participants' preferences toward the dissimilar candidate. Much like Dr. Weinberger's work on the 2016 election, Knafo's findings reveal the inescapable influence of unconscious associations on voting behavior.

"Voters who are torn between candidates are often weighing multiple issues simultaneously, but they don't really know how they are prioritizing those issues," Knafo said. "A third-party candidate can prime them to suddenly weight one of those issues much more."

Correcting Unconscious Perceptions

To balance out the scales, Knafo suggests implementing voter education programs on decision biases, which can remind voters that their minds can change on a dime.

Dr. Weinberger agrees. "Both our spontaneous and long-term behavior is mostly controlled by unconscious processes. The only way conscious processes have an impact is when you're focused and thinking about something. Some people are just voting in a certain way because they feel, deep down, 'I want to have a beer with this person.' If they're aware of that, maybe they'll make the unconscious conscious and that will lead to a positive effect."

Although their study looks at a small slice of voting behavior, it has enormous implications for electoral outcomes. Rather than concentrate efforts on committed supporters, Dr. Weinberger believes political campaigns should court undecided voters-and pay special attention to their unconscious associations. With most major elections now down to single-digit percentage points, even a few swayed voters can tip the scales. "If you can move 4 percent of people away from one candidate, that's a landslide," he said.