Thin-slice forecasting

Jesse Shapiro and Daniel Benjamin have an interesting new paper (forthcoming in Review of Economics & Statistics) entitled Thin-Slice Forecasts of Gubernatorial Elections. The abstract reads:

We showed 10-second, silent video clips of unfamiliar gubernatorial debates to a group of experimental participants and asked them to predict the election outcomes. The participants’ predictions explain more than 20 percent of the variation in the actual two-party vote share across the 58 elections in our study, and their importance survives a range of controls, including state fixed effects. In a horse race of alternative forecasting models, participants’ visual forecasts significantly outperform economic variables in predicting vote shares, and are comparable in predictive power to a measure of incumbency status. Adding policy information to the video clips by turning on the sound tends, if anything, to worsen participants’ accuracy, suggesting that naïveté may be an asset in some forecasting tasks.

So maybe there is something to the story of the Nixon vs. Kennedy televised debates being the clincher for Kennedy. Those who watched said Kennedy won; those who listened to the radio broadcast said Nixon won. I suppose in an age of television, if more viewers watch than listen, then thin-slices in presidential debates can matter more.