Psychological Biases and Personality Differences in the UK’s Referendum on EU Membership 2016
Personality and psychological biases in the Brexit referendum is an OPF research project that examined the differences between voters intending to vote ‘Remain’ versus voters who intend to vote ‘Leave’ in the 2016 UK’s referendum on its EU membership, and the extent to which these biases and traits could be targeted and manipulated online.
In July 2018 OPF released working paper of our research. On 22nd March 2023, Frontiers in Psychology published a peer-reviewed version of our paper; a technical summary of the results is available here.
OPF aims to empower individuals by exposing the risks of online activities. We hope this research will help you:
Discover:
- How the electorate’s political views are divided according to people’s inherent personalities and thought processes.
- How these patterns are strongly correlated to voting patterns across geography, age groups and educational backgrounds.
- How information about people’s use of social media could be used to influence the outcome of elections and referendums.
Discuss and Decide:
- How appropriate and effective are referendums and other existing mechanisms for the public making political choices in the current digital age?
- Should access to and the use of personal online data be better regulated? But, how do we ensure that we unleash the power of personal data for social good?
- How do we best channel information, provide clarifications on accuracy and interpretation, and inform open-minded rational public debate in an era of targeted ‘fake news’?
The published, peer reviewed paper is available here, and a technical summary of the results are available here.
Preliminary results from this OPF research project were released by OPF in June 2016 and April 2017.