“I Voted” Stickers are Expressions…and Nudges.

     I love “I voted” stickers. Placing the sticker on my shirt gives me a sense of pride and fills me with patriotism. It also shows others that I voted, allowing me to express to others (who I see on the day I vote) that I think voting is important. And this feel great! But it also does something that is a bit more interesting: it silently nudges the people I see to vote too.

    We encounter nudges throughout our day, but no experience is as visceral as the coffee shop tipping situation with Square, which I encountered yesterday. The barista turned the Square screen around and there it is: 10%, 15%, 20%, or no tip. I had just bought a large pumpkin spice latte (in season, of course), and was faced with this horrifying moment. It was just a coffee, no need to tip, right? But, the screen makes it seem that not tipping is a “bad look”; what if the people behind me see that I didn’t tip? The nudge helps to “coax” people into tipping more often than they normally would without this tipping mechanism. As Amanda Ventresca of Café Grumpy in Manhattan notes, “Square puts [tipping] in their face as an option, and although we’re not necessarily busier, tips have gone up.” “Square says that 45 to 50% of all transactions on its systems involve a tip.”

    The “I voted” sticker functions in a similar way. “It's social pressure, not economics, that motivates the marginal, or on-the-fence, voter.” Thus, I see the “I voted” sticker as having a dual function: 1) allowing me to express to others that I voted and 2) pressuring others into voting themselves. Assuming that the people who might be influenced by the “I voted” stickers won’t simply go buy these stickers like Professor Coppock but actually go to vote in order to obtain the sticker, then the nudge might just work. The “I voted” sticker is not only a component of my expressive utility from voting, but also a social pressure tool that attempts to persuade others to vote through perceived ostracization if they refrain from doing so. And as Stefano DellaVigna, an economics professor at the University of California Berkeley and author of "Voting to Tell Others” shows, “the potential public shame of not voting is enough to boost voter participation by 2 to 3 percentage points.” The nudge works again.