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10 Implicit attitudes have been suggested as a key to unlock the hidden preferences of 11 undecided voters. Past research, however, offered mixed support for this hypothesis. The present 12 research used a large nationally representative sample and a longitudinal design to examine the 13 predictive utility of implicit and explicit attitude measures in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. 14 In our analyses, explicit attitudes toward candidates predicted voting better for decided than 15 undecided voters, but implicit candidate attitudes were predictive of voting for both decided and 16 undecided voters. Extending our examination to implicit and explicit racial attitudes, we found 17 the same pattern. Taken together, these results provide convergent evidence that implicit 18 attitudes predict voting about as well for the undecided as for decided voters. We also evaluated 19 a novel explanation for these effects by evaluating whether implicit attitudes may predict the 20 choices of undecided voters, in part, because they are overlooked when people introspect about 21 their confidence. Consistent with this idea, we found that the extremity of explicit but not 22 implicit attitudes was associated with greater confidence. These analyses shed new light on the 23 utility of implicit measures in predicting future behavior among individuals who feel undecided. 24 Considering the prior studies together with this new evidence, the data seem to be consistent that 25 implicit attitudes may be successful in predicting the behavior of undecided voters. 26 Decisions among the Undecided 3 Introduction 27 What does it mean when someone says they are undecided about how to vote just weeks 28 before an important election? Do undecided voters truly have no clear preferences? Or, do they 29 simply lack conscious insight into what their preferences are? In either case, undecided voters 30 are hard to ignore. Less than two months before the 2012 U.S. presidential election, five percent 31 of voters in swing states were undecided, and another 17% said they might change their minds 32 [1]. These percentages are more than enough to decide most elections, making the prediction of 33 undecided voters’ behavior an important problem for pollsters and social scientists. Is it possible 34 to predict the behavior of individuals who cannot predict their own? 35 Psychologists have recently suggested an innovative solution to this problem. Galdi, 36 Arcuri, and Gawronski [2] proposed that a key to predicting the behavior of undecided voters lies 37 in the distinction between explicit and implicit attitudes. Explicit attitudes are evaluations of 38 topics that are consciously endorsed and voluntarily reported. Traditional self-report surveys, 39 including the questions asked in polls, measure explicit attitudes. In contrast, implicit attitudes 40 are spontaneous evaluations that are automatically evoked when encountering or contemplating 41 an issue. Implicit evaluations come to mind whether or not they are endorsed as true. They may 42 affect behavior even when their influence is unwanted. 43 Galdi and colleagues [2] proposed that explicit attitudes are stronger predictors of 44 behavior for decided voters than undecided voters, but implicit attitudes are stronger predictors 45 for undecided voters than decided voters. They reasoned that implicit attitudes may indirectly 46 influence future voting behavior by biasing the processing of decision-relevant information. To 47 the extent that people use this biased set of information in making a deliberate decision, implicit 48 attitudes may predict eventual decisions even though respondents are undecided when the 49 Decisions among the Undecided 4 implicit attitudes are measured. Evidence for this hypothesis was reported by Galdi, Gawronski, 50 Arcuri, and Friese [3], who demonstrated that the implicit attitudes of undecided participants 51 predicted selective exposure to information consistent with their implicit attitudes. Individuals 52 who describe themselves as undecided may therefore have implicit attitudes that will ultimately 53 lead to conscious preferences, but have not yet done so (see also [4]). 54 There is additional reason to believe that implicit attitudes may predict behavior for 55 undecided voters: Being “decided” or “undecided” is a meta-cognitive judgment that people 56 make about their own decision processes. Models of explicit and implicit attitudes suggest that 57 people are more likely to consider their explicit attitudes to be a valid basis for judgment [5,6]. 58 Whereas explicit attitudes are experienced as conscious preferences or “considered opinions,” 59 implicit attitudes tend to be experienced as “gut feelings” [5,7]. 60 We suggest that, when people indicate whether they have decided, they are more likely to 61 base this judgment on their consciously endorsed (i.e., explicit) attitudes than on implicit 62 attitudes. If explicit attitudes strongly favor one option over the other, then the respondent will 63 claim to be decided, whereas if the explicit attitude is weak, unclear, or ambivalent, then the 64 respondent will claim to be undecided. Based on this reasoning, explicit attitudes should be more 65 predictive of behavior among decided voters than undecided voters. Introspection, however, may 66 overlook implicit attitudes. When people introspect about whether they have decided, they may 67 focus on consciously endorsed attitudes and neglect implicit attitudes as though they were 68 invisible. Implicit attitudes would nonetheless be automatically activated and would still have the 69 potential to influence behavior. Based on this introspective invisibility hypothesis, implicit 70 attitudes should be equally predictive of behavior among the decided and the undecided. 71 Decisions among the Undecided 5 The introspective invisibility account and the biased processing account make different 72 predictions about whether implicit attitudes should predict behavior for decided voters after 73 explicit attitudes have been accounted for. Under the biased processing account, implicit 74 attitudes lead to deliberate decisions only indirectly, by biasing the formation of the deliberate 75 decision. Once the biased information search has led to a deliberate decision, no direct effect of 76 implicit attitudes is predicted over and above the effects of explicit attitudes. Both accounts thus 77 predict that implicit attitudes should predict decisions among the undecided, but only the 78 introspective invisibility account predicts that implicit attitudes should be similarly predictive 79 among decided voters, after removing the effects of explicit attitudes. 80 Do Implicit Attitudes Predict Future Behavior of Undecided Voters? 81 The theoretical reasons that implicit attitudes might predict the behavior of undecided 82 voters are clear, but the empirical evidence to date has been mixed. In this section, we review the 83 results of the most relevant previous studies. One study by Arcuri and colleagues [8] examined 84 implicit political attitudes in the 2001 Italian general election. This study found that implicit 85 attitudes predicted voting intentions for both decided and undecided voters, consistent with the 86 idea that voters neglect implicit attitudes when they assess whether they are decided. Based on 87 this finding, implicit attitude measures should be useful in predicting the behavior of undecided 88 voters even if the voters themselves do not yet know how they will vote. However, this study did 89 not simultaneously account for explicit measures and, therefore, cannot speak to the unique 90 predictive power of implicit measures. 91 A second study by Galdi and colleagues [2] compared implicit and explicit attitudes 92 toward a politically charged issue in an Italian sample. In separate analyses for decided and 93 undecided participants, this study found that explicit, but not implicit, attitudes were predictive 94 Decisions among the Undecided 6 of future choices among decided participants. In contrast, implicit, but not explicit, attitudes were 95 predictive of future choices among undecided participants. This pattern suggests that voters rely 96 on explicit attitudes when assessing whether they have decided, but when they are undecided 97 they rely more on implicit attitudes. These analyses, too, suggest that implicit attitude measures 98 should be especially useful in predicting the behavior of undecided voters. However, in multiple 99 regression analyses that treated decidedness as a dummy-coded moderator variable, explicit 100 attitudes were not moderated by confidence in predicting future choices, while implicit attitudes 101 were. While this finding corroborates the account that implicit attitudes may be more predictive 102 for undecided than decided voters, it also suggests that explicit attitudes may be equally 103 predictive for both decided and undecided voters. 104 Finally, Friese and colleagues [9] examined the ability of implicit and explicit attitude 105 measures to predict voting behavior in the 2008 presidential election in the United States and the 106 2009 parliamentary election in Germany. Across three sets of multiple regression analyses that 107 treated decidedness as a moderator variable and examined implicit attitude measures separately, 108 implicit attitudes were consistently predictive of voting behavior, and they were more predictive 109 for decided than undecided respondents (in contrast to Galdi et al.’s [2] findings). However, the 110 variance due to explicit attitudes and their interaction with decidedness was not removed in these 111 analyses. Because explicit and implicit attitudes were strongly correlated in these samples (rs 112 between .52 and .72), implicit attitudes may have spuriously appeared to be more predictive 113 among decided than undecided voters because of the shared variance with explicit attitudes. 114 Indeed, once explicit a

Correction: Decisions among the Undecided: Implicit Attitudes Predict Future Voting Behavior of Undecided Voters