Peer pressure
Voting

Peer pressure can be especially effective (more so than door-to-door visits and telephone calls) in getting people to vote. Gerber, Green, and Larimer conducted a large-scale field experiment involving over 180,000 Michigan households in 2006 and four treatments: one was a reminder to vote, one was a reminder to vote and a note informing them that they were being studied, one that listed the voting records for all potential household individuals, and finally one that listed the voting records for the household individuals and their neighbors. The final treatment emphasized peer pressure within a neighborhood; neighbors could view each other's voting habits with the lists, and so the social norm of "voting is best for the community" is combined with the fear that individuals' peers would judge their lack of voting. Compared to a baseline rate of 29.7% (only the voting reminder), the treatment that utilized peer pressure increased the percentage of household voters by 8.1 percentage points (to 37.8%), which exceeds the value of in-person canvassing and personalized phone calls.

A similar large-scale field experiment conducted by Todd Rogers, Donald P. Green, Carolina Ferrerosa Young, and John Ternovski (2017) studied the impact of a social pressure mailing in the context of a high-salience election, the 2012 Wisconsin gubernatorial election. Social pressure mailers included the line, “We’re sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and does not vote.” This study found a treatment effect of 1.0 percentage point, a statistically significant but far weaker effect than the 8.1 percentage point effect reported by Gerber, Green, and Larimer. The 2017 study's effects were particularly sizable for low-propensity voters.
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