Does 'Be a Voter' Beat 'Vote'? The 2011 Wording Experiment Behind Identity-Based Habits
Bryan et al. (2011) found 'be a voter' lifted turnout over 'vote'; three later field tests did not. What identity-based habits advice can and cannot lean on.
In this article5 sections
“How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?” Some participants in Christopher Bryan’s 2008 California experiment read that sentence. Others read “How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?” One word changed from a verb to a noun. Bryan, Gregory Walton, Todd Rogers and Carol Dweck reported in PNAS in 2011 that the noun version produced more voting. It is the cleanest test anyone has run of the idea behind identity-based habits, the advice to become the type of person who does the thing.
What did Bryan, Walton, Rogers and Dweck actually run?
Three experiments, published as Bryan et al. (2011), PNAS 108(31), 12653-12656.
| Experiment | Setting | Analyzed sample | Noun vs verb result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2008 California, eligible but unregistered | 34 | Interest in registering: 4.44 vs 3.39 on a 5-point scale |
| 2 | 2008 California, registered, not yet voted | 88 | Turnout 95.5% vs 81.8% |
| 3 | 2009 New Jersey governor race, registered | 214 | Turnout 89.9% vs 79.0% |
Turnout in the second and third studies came from official voter records, which is what made the paper persuasive. Participants answered on the eve of the election or on election day. The New Jersey gap was about eleven percentage points, and the authors found no moderation by age, gender, education or political interest in that study.
Do identity-based habits rest on this study?
The claim, in its strong form: if “be a voter” beats “vote”, then “be a reader” beats “read”, and “be an early riser” beats “get up early”. James Clear’s Atomic Habits makes the identity case in that spirit. His site puts the book’s line as “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become,” and his identity-based habits page frames a goal as “Become the type of person who moves more every day.”
The voter study fits that story neatly. It is also the only reason to believe the story works through wording. Clear’s own argument is different in kind: identity grows from repeated evidence (“In order to believe in a new identity, we have to prove it to ourselves”), and his page points to Simon Sinek’s Start with Why for a similar framework, not to this paper. Bryan’s manipulation is one word in one survey item, read once. Treating the second as proof of the first borrows credibility the experiment never claimed.
Did the effect replicate?
Not in the three field tests that followed. Alan Gerber, Gregory Huber, Daniel Biggers and David Hendry (2016, PNAS 113(26), 7112-7117) phoned registered voters before the 2014 primaries in Michigan, Missouri and Tennessee. About 2,200 people were assigned to each wording. Turnout was 30.1 percent after the noun script and 31.1 percent after the verb script, a difference indistinguishable from zero. A short standard get-out-the-vote message had a larger point estimate than either wording and was the only one of the three to differ significantly from the placebo calls. Fang, Gerber and Huber (2017, Political Psychology) ran another large replication and again found no evidence that the wording change raised turnout.
Critics said those tests ran in low-salience elections. Gerber, Huber and Fang answered with a preregistered experiment during the 2016 presidential election, published in Behavioural Public Policy (2023, vol. 7, issue 2, online 2020). Their summary: “We find no evidence that noun wording increases turnout compared to verb wording,” including in competitive states.
The differences between the studies are real. Bryan used internet surveys with student and panel samples, and the replications used phone calls to random voter-file samples. Gerber’s team suggested the original result may have been a false positive from sampling variability, and also allowed that the effect may be sensitive to context. Both readings fit the data, and the replications are, taken together, much larger than the original.
What about “don’t be a cheater”?
Bryan, Adams and Monin (2013, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 142(4), 1001-1005) tested the same wording on dishonesty. In Experiment 1, 50 people approached on a university campus were told the researchers were studying how common “cheating is” or how common “cheaters are.” Asked to think of a number from 1 to 10 and report whether it was even (an even number paid $5), 50.0 percent of the “cheating” group claimed an even number against 20.8 percent of the “cheater” group. A baseline group of 26 people, offered nothing, produced 19.2 percent.
In Experiment 3, 99 Facebook respondents self-reported ten coin flips and got $1 per head. The average reported heads was 6.22 under “Please don’t cheat,” 6.31 with no message, and 5.23 under “Please don’t be a cheater,” close to the chance expectation of 5. The plain admonition did nothing. It is a brief report with small cells: no condition held more than 37 people.
What does it mean for getting out of bed?
The claim: identity wording moves behavior. The counter-claim: the best test of that, repeated three times at scale, found nothing. The synthesis has three parts.
- The voter and cheater behaviors are single, near-term acts. Both studies measured one decision within about a day of the wording. Getting up is a repeated act, and none of these studies tested anything repeated on consecutive days.
- Nobody tested a private, daily, mildly unpleasant behavior. Bryan’s team wrote that the effect likely depends on the behavior being something people feel they should do, and proposed energy conservation and recycling as future tests. Rising at 6:30 is closer to those than to voting.
- Identity can still matter without the wording trick. People guard a self-image through the excuses they pick, as self-handicapping studies found, and a habit can hang on one small first act, as with Tharp’s morning cab. Neither depends on a noun.
A cheap personal test follows from the same logic as the replications: write the verdict rule first, as in a fifteen-minute preregistration, and measure the time you stand up with a record such as a recorded video rather than a feeling. Four weeks of coin-flipped noun and verb prompts would be more data on your mornings than all of the studies above.
The one-word change moved a sentence read the day before a single election. Whether it moves the Tuesday after the next Tuesday is a question these experiments did not ask.