The worm turns
The leadership debates preceding last year's General Election introduced the opinion worm to UK screens. But research by psychologists indicates it could have undue influence on the electoral process.
When Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg appeared on TV for leadership debates, the broadcasters included a "worm", more properly called a "Continuous Response Tracking Measure", to show how a panel of voters were receiving the debate. The worm is widely used in electoral debates in the USA and other parts of the world but this was its first use in the UK. Each panellist had a handset with which they could express approval or disapproval of what the current speaker was saying. The "worm", a line across the screen showing the average opinion, climbed higher or lower in response to the panellists pressing those buttons. This proved popular, easy to understand, and some say watching the worm was more interesting than watching the candidates.
However, psychologists led by Professor Jeff Bowers of Bristol University conducted an experiment on the worm effect with troubling results. They took groups of people and showed them the leadership debate but replaced the worms with ones of the psychologists own making. The participants were, of course, unaware of this and thought they were watching the live debate with the real worm. Afterwards, the participants were asked which leader had been most impressive and which the least. Despite all watching the same TV footage, groups which watched debates where the worm had been artificially manipulated to favour Brown showed a significant swing towards Brown. Likewise, by manipulating the worm towards Cameron or Clegg they could demonstrate significant swings in opinion towards those candidates.
In other words, the leadership debate supposedly gave us the chance to form our own opinions, but we were influenced not only by the leaders' arguments, but also by the opinions of the people controlling the opinion worm.
One might argue that Opinion Polls have always influenced public opinion, but when a research organisation conducts an opinion poll in the run up to the election, it questions a hundred thousand people or more and tries to make sure its sample is a representative cross-section of the electorate. Compare that with the worm panels which are chosen by the broadcasters, not statisticians, and can be made up of as few as 12 people with unknown political bias. Added to that, the worm is much more seductive and authoritative than the dry dusty figures obtained from opinion polls.
We don't know if the worm effect translated into actual votes come polling day, and neither do we know if other technology gimmicks like flash mobs influence the way people vote, but it would be dangerous to ignore the possibility.
28th April 2011
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.