Does It Matter?

Overview

Objectives/Goals Our project was to find out if the placement on a ballot mattered in the voting results. Methods/Materials 120 subjects Ballot 1 Red,Yellow,Green,Blue-30 Ballot 2 Yellow,Green,Blue,Red-30 Ballot 3 Green,Blue,Red, Yellow-30 Ballot 4 Blue,Red,Yellow,Green-30 Create four different ballots alternating the order of the colors from ballot to ballot. Pass out each ballot to thirty different subjects and have them circle their favorite color. Record and collect data Results After having the subjects circle their favorite color from the ballots with alternating color order. In our results, it showed that in all the ballots, blue had the most votes regardless of the order. Red had the second most votes when it was listed first and third. Green had the second most votes on Ballot 2 when listed second and in Ballot 4, listed last. Yellow had the least votes in all the ballots. This proved that our hypothesis was incorrect. We thought that the order was going to matter but it didn#t. Blue had the most votes on all the ballots. We also believed that our testing was inaccurate because it asked the subjects to circle their favorite color and they were prone to actually look and decide their favorite choice. We believe that primacy effect would show more importance in a race where people were voting for candidates. Conclusions/Discussion We believed that the placement did matter because of primacy effect. Primacy effects are biases toward selecting the first object considered in a set. We tested this by making a ballot of favorite colors that included red, yellow, green, and blue. We had Ballot 1 where the order was red, yellow, green, and blue. We had thirty subjects chose their favorite color. In Ballot 2 the order was yellow, green, blue and red. Again we had thirty subjects chose their favorite color. Ballot 3 had the order of green, blue, red, and yellow. Ballot 4 had the order of blue, red, yellow, and green. In all the ballots, in spite of the order,blue had the most votes. This proved out hypothesis incorrect. In our testing blue had the most votes even though it wasn#t listed first. We believe that our testing was inaccurate for our question. Because the

Competition history

• CSEF 2006 Social Sciences (Junior Division Only) · Entry J1702

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2006 project