- Hey, smart people.

Joe here.

Okay, so voting, why do we do it?

- Everyone should get out and vote no matter who they're voting for.

- I hope every American will turn out and vote.

- The choice is yours, America.

Please make the right one.

- From a young age, we're constantly reminded how it's our civic duty to vote, how it's good to participate in democracy, and that voting is a privilege many people around the world desperately want.

These are all true, but I'm also not kidding myself about how powerful my one vote actually is.

Statistically speaking, my chances of casting the deciding vote in a major election are smaller than my chances of getting hit by a car on the way to vote.

Those odds don't seem like much of a reward for the hassle of doing research, taking off work or school, getting yourself to the polls, and yet, people turn out to vote in large numbers time and time again, including me.

This is a paradox that's confused political thinkers since the dawn of modern democracy.

But before making this video, I realized I've never really asked myself why I vote, like, what motivates me to actually do it versus not voting, or why anyone chooses to vote or not.

Today, we're searching for answers to those questions, and those answers serve as a really weird reminder that the actual reasons why we do things might not be the reasons why we think we do things.

(playful music) In 2020, more than 158 million Americans cast their vote for president, the most votes ever in an American election.

India's 2024 election was the largest democratic election in the history of the world with 642 million total votes.

These are impressive numbers in modern democracy.

Yet in both of those elections, one out of three people eligible to vote didn't.

But the real mystery isn't why so many people don't vote, it's why so many people do.

Now, I'm a scientist, but I'm not the right kind of scientist to figure this out.

Turns out there's very little molecular biology involved in the workings of representative democracy, which is sad.

So I called up someone who's dedicated a big piece of his career to understanding this paradox.

- I'm Don Green.

I'm professor of political science here at Columbia University.

I study campaigns and elections with special reference to voter turnout.

- Now, people have been questioning how to get people to vote for centuries, but the modern version of the voting paradox goes back to the 1950s when an economist named Anthony Downs, along with other researchers, began looking at democracy through a scientific lens.

What that meant was they started looking to psychology to understand how and why citizens make decisions.

- Anthony Downs in 1957 wrote a book called "An Economic Theory of Democracy", in which he made the argument that, you know, rational voters would be hesitant to vote because they can't unilaterally decide the outcome of an of an election, and they can enjoy the outcome of an election regardless of whether they participated or revile the outcome of the election as the case may be.

- The key word here is rational.

These early ideas from Downs and others assumed that we are rational people who decide to do things for rational reasons.

So what does being rational actually mean?

- So Downs had the idea that people would vote if and only if the benefits of doing so outweighed the costs.

So what figures in the benefits side of the equation, what figures in the cost side?

- Rational choice theory assumes that individuals make decisions by weighing the costs and benefits of their options, and we're always striving to maximize happiness or satisfaction.

According to this theory, when making any choice, people should logically choose the option that provides the highest net benefit or the least cost.

But in many real life situations, people don't do that.

Like at the grocery store, you may stand in a cereal aisle judging the best cost per unit or getting the healthiest option, but you might also just grab the Lucky Charms because you're in a hurry and you don't have time to do a cost benefit analysis about breakfast.

I mean, we know we should exercise more and not procrastinate to get the most long-term benefits and the least personal costs.

But do we do that?

This is where we get stuck when we try to look at voting is a purely rational choice, because if choosing to vote was just about reducing costs and increasing benefits, it would be much easier to get people to actually do it.

In the 19th century, some politicians tried to increase the benefits of voting by turning it into an all day festival full of music, free whiskey.

Sounds kind of fun.

In 2005, professor Green himself organized festivals during election season with free hamburgers and cotton candy for voters.

But even these very tangible benefits, like food and booze, didn't dramatically boost voter turnout.

Other measures aimed at lowering costs for voters like allowing early voting or absentee ballots have also had smaller than expected effects on turnout.

- It doesn't seem to make a big difference whether you have early in-person voting or voting by mail.

It makes a little bit of difference to lower the costs, you know, make the registration deadline closer to the election.

But it's a reminder that those kinds of material costs are not so crucial for a large number of people.

- So if most of us aren't making a rational choice whether not to vote, then why do we do it?

- Another thing that's relevant is, what might be called by academics, prescriptive social norms.

So these are the kinds of implicit rules about what we ought to do that we carry around since childhood.

- [Joe] Like many of us learned, we ought to put our napkins on our laps at restaurants, or we have to dress a certain way for school.

These aren't laws, but they're really powerful social codes.

- We are instructed about social norms in a quite emotionally painful way from the moment we are little children, either by our parents or our siblings or our classmates, and we are told what kind of behavior is going to to be deemed as acceptable.

- Sometimes we're told this directly, like when our parents tell us to do something.

- Could you serve yourself in a less athletic manner?

- Is this better?

- But other times, we just see what's going on around us and internalize what our peers consider right and wrong.

And Professor Green thinks this goes for voting too.

- Although you don't have to vote, I think you might feel a bit ashamed if you didn't vote and had to admit it to someone who was quizzing you about how you voted or whether you voted or where you voted.

And so to some extent, people defer to social norms by voting rather than taking heat later.

- All of this stuff about social norms makes a lot of sense when you consider that we are essentially carrying the same brains that humans had in the stone age, just in modern bodies.

As our species evolved, belonging to a group used to literally be a matter of life and death.

And even though most of us aren't hunter-gatherers anymore, that instinct to behave in ways that are accepted by our group, it's still there.

And real experiments have been done that show just how powerful social norms are when it comes to voting.

During a 2006 election in Michigan, Green and some other researchers mailed voters a written message about the importance of voting.

It was this kind of scolding message written in official looking type, and it presented the person with a record of whether or not they'd voted in past elections, which is public information.

In some cases though, the letter also said that their neighbors would be told whether or not they voted in this election.

In the group that received that extra social pressure that their neighbors would know, voter turnout exploded.

- That was really a theoretical exercise.

It was about whether the forceful assertion of social norms increased their impact on turnout.

And I think that it was a quite resounding yes.

There was a strong social norm that was being revealed through that kind of experiment.

- What's really interesting is that social norms don't always come from other people telling us what we should do.

Social pressure can come from ourselves too.

I mean, think of all the times you've been hard on yourself for not saying the right thing, for not donating to that thing at work, for not buying the cage-free eggs, even though nobody really knows but you.

- Why should it matter that I knock on your door and implore you to vote?

I mean, I'm just a stranger.

Why should that do anything at all?

And I think that part of the reason it works is that it does often invoke social norms.

Your feelings of obligation are implicated, particularly when you say, yes, I will vote, I pledge to vote.

You somewhat feel obligated to follow along with a promise.

And indeed, many of our institutions, like marriage, are based on promises.

So we've gotten a helping of social norms all our lives about upholding promises, and that's one of them.

- This is kind of a weird thing to consider about ourselves.

According to experiments like these, according to political science and psychology, the reasons we vote, the reasons we include our voice in the democratic process has a lot to do with social pressure, with being taught by family, friends, and society that this is a thing we should do and that we'll feel bad in some way if we don't do it.

Most of us would probably fight that conclusion.

If you ask people why they vote, many people will say things like, I vote for the greater good, or I vote to protect the rights of others.

And there is truth to this.

We are a species with altruism.

We will do things that benefit others even if it's at our own expense.

And we do that because of those very same evolutionary instincts about being part of a group.

But in a way, that altruism may also be a social norm itself.

We learned that it's good and right to look out for other people, so we do it.

And our group, humans, society, whatever, is better for it.

Now, I have voted in essentially every major election, local or national, since I've been old enough.

And I hope that you do too because we can't have a democracy if people don't vote.

Time and time again, in studying human behavior, we find that there are powerful unconscious forces behind the ways that we act, behind the choices that we make, and we must always remember that the reasons that we tell ourselves may be very different from why we actually do things.

Humans are a complex species made of groups of complex individuals, and that also means that we usually don't choose to do things or not do things for one reason only.

So why do we vote?

Because we think we should?

Because we think it's right?

Because we want others to know that we care about being part of this big, messy human family?

It seems like all of these are true.

In the end, democracy is a human invention.

So like many other social institutions that we've invented, it doesn't play out predictably.

It may not always be rational.

It doesn't unfold like the laws of physics.

Instead, it reflects all of our messy complexity.

Stay curious.

You get to, let's just use the first one.

It was fine.

Bum-bu-ru-rum-bum-bum.