For Immediate Release
October 31, 2006
Diane Gray, dianeg@socionomics.org
Phone: (678) 207-1039

Socionomics Foundation Wins National Research Competition

Gainesville, Ga. – The American Political Science Association recently announced that the Socionomics Foundation's questions about social mood were among those chosen from more than 1,100 proposed queries to be included an upcoming research project funded by the National Science Foundation.

Some 300 organizations submitted proposals. The Socionomics Foundation is the only non-university-based research organization among the 30 whose questions were selected for the NSF study to be conducted this month.

Dr. Wayne Parker, Executive Director of the Socionomics Foundation in Gainesville, Ga., proposed "Questions about Social Mood" for the Pilot Study. Dr. Jon Krosnick of Stanford University and Dr. Skip Lupia of the University of Michigan are the co-Principal Investigators for the study. They announced the winners for the 2006 American National Election Studies (ANES) Pilot Study at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in September.

Parker's questions will enable researchers at the Socionomics Foundation to test their hypotheses about the connection between social mood and political decision-making when voters are uncertain about their future.

"We hope that our participation in this project will interest more academic researchers in studying the role social mood plays in national elections," Parker says. "It's quite an honor to be selected from so large a field and to become part of a highly regarded research endeavor that has been collecting data nationally since 1948."

The Socionomics Foundation is an independent, nonprofit research foundation founded in 2004 by Robert Prechter, whose research over the past 25 years is the basis for the new science of socionomics. This new social science focuses on predicting significant trend changes in various aspects of human social behavior related to decision-making under uncertainty. While socionomics has relevance for many of the social sciences – including economics, finance, sociology, and international relations – its application to political science has been devoted primarily to studying major U.S. election outcomes.

A current study not yet published by the Socionomics Foundation hypothesizes that incumbent U.S. presidents are more likely to be reelected during uptrends in social mood but rejected during downtrends in social mood as measured by major stock market indexes. Prechter comments, "A rational set of ideas about policies may predict what voters may say, but measures of social mood better predict what voters will do, as they unconsciously act upon their moods along with the rest of the herd."

The ANES solicited proposals this year using a new Internet-based approach. This first-of-its-kind invitation resulted in participation nationwide by hundreds of scholars from many scientific disciplines. The Pilot Study will evaluate new questions that have not been included on previous ANES surveys but could prove valuable to researchers in the future. The selection criteria for the winning proposals included factors such as novelty of idea, theoretical foundation, empirical support, breadth of relevance, and generalizability. For more details, visit: http://www.electionstudies.org/ and http://www.socionomics.org.

According to the ANES website, "The mission of the American National Election Studies is to inform explanations of election outcomes by providing data that support rich hypothesis testing, maximize methodological excellence, measure many variables, and promote comparisons across people, contexts, and time. The ANES serves this mission by providing researchers with a view of the political world through the eyes of ordinary citizens. Such data are critical, because these citizens' actions determine election outcomes. As has been true for every presidential election since 1948, a presidential year pre- and post-election study will be conducted using face-to-face interviewing of a nationally representative sample of adults, with an unusually high response rate. This study will include questions specific to the election of 2008 and also questions that augment the ANES time series, which is now in its sixth decade."

To help scholars develop and validate new measurement tools for use in the ANES surveys, the ANES pilot study will be run in November, 2006, re-interviewing respondents from the 2004 ANES study. The ANES website notes that through venues such as electionstudies.org, the resulting data will be distributed widely to serve thousands of scholars and to be used in classrooms around the world to enrich research and education.

For more information about the Socionomics Foundation, please visit our website at www.socionomics.org.