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Voting for Unknown Candidates

Distortions in Post Factum Explanations

Hebrew University, Jerusalem

In the primary elections in Israel's Democratic Movement for Change, voters ranked up to 30 candidates out of a list of 151. In this study voters were asked to explain their reasons for selecting candidates who were totally unknown to them except for a 100-word presentation in a candidates booklet. Spontaneous, open-ended responses stressed candidates' demographic and record data more strongly than personality attributes and platform, while the reverse was true for closed-ended ratings of 18 categories explaining the selection of the same unknown candidates. The pattern of the closed-ended ratings was similar to the patterns of dimensions considered important in selection of candidates in general. These results are discussed in terms of Nisbett and Wilson's ideas concerning cognitive distortions in verbal explanations of behavior, raising the issue of experimental versus ecological validity.

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