Study: Stress could sway election

Election Day is seldom associated with raging hormones. But three professors from Israel, where all politics is vocal, suggest that the very act of voting generates stress levels that could affect the outcome.

In an experiment conducted in a small Israeli town during the fiercely contested 2009 national election, the researchers took saliva samples from people who were about to vote. They found higher levels of glucocorticoid hormones, including cortisol, which are secreted by the adrenal glands and are associated with stress.

Not only that, but people who planned to vote for the underdog tended to exhibit more stress — affirming a study from the United States that found voters for Barack Obama had cortisol levels that remained steadier than those of voters for John McCain as the 2008 election results rolled in.

"This is the first study to explore the psychological well-being of actual voters through an endocrinal measure at the ballot," the professors — Israel Waismel-Manor of the University of Haifa and Gal Ifergane and Hagit Cohen of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev — wrote for a recent edition of the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology.

They conducted the experiment in Omer, a small town 70 miles south of Tel Aviv, and hope to replicate it in the United States a year from now, when voters choose a president.

"In an ideal democracy, we would like citizens to make reasoned choices, and vote based on the ideas and quality of the parties and candidates in a given election," the authors wrote.

They do not discount the usefulness of emotion in making a choice — they say that "feeling anxious about a candidate is a good enough reason not to vote for him or her" — but they add, "We must understand that emotions are not merely feelings; often they carry with them a physio-endocrinal component which itself has the potential to biologically affect decision-making at the ballot box."

People with higher cortisol levels are more likely to make snap decisions, the authors say, citing earlier studies. Higher levels of the hormone can affect memory.

"We do not argue that cortisol causes amnesia," Waismel-Manor said, "but it is possible that as some of these voters approach the ballot, they tend to forget how good or bad the last four years have been, or perhaps just that the troops are still in the Middle East, or that the recession is still here. That could be enough for some undecided voters or leaners to tilt the decision one way or the other."

One way to reduce stress, he suggests, would be to encourage absentee voting or mail ballots to eliminate "the public performance" of voting.

Waismel-Manor said he hoped to collaborate with U.S. scholars "to provide the public and decision makers in Washington substantiated data that may or may not confirm that voting is indeed stressful, what causes this stress, can the stress be reduced, and whether voters with lower stress vote more closely to their true preference — the preference they had the night before Election Day."