BARACK OBAMA or John McCain? Floating voters in the upcoming US election may already have made up their minds – they just don’t know it yet.
Bertram Gawronski, a social psychologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and his colleagues asked 129 residents of Vicenza, Italy, whether they would support a controversial proposal to enlarge the city’s US military base. To measure subconscious biases, the team used an “implicit association” test to record, for example, whether volunteers associated pictures of the base with positive words such as “joy” or negative ones such as “pain”.
When polled a week…
