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- Published: 28 January 2026
Nature Communications , Article number: (2026) Cite this article
We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.
Abstract
Representing the will of voters is challenging when many opt out of indicating their preferences. Such opt-out behavior has been explained by voters lacking a preference and/or disliking their options. We provide evidence for a third account: pe…
- Article
- Open access
- Published: 28 January 2026
Nature Communications , Article number: (2026) Cite this article
We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.
Abstract
Representing the will of voters is challenging when many opt out of indicating their preferences. Such opt-out behavior has been explained by voters lacking a preference and/or disliking their options. We provide evidence for a third account: people opt out of choosing between undesirable candidates because bad options are incongruent with their typical goal of selecting the best one. Using a voting task, we show across two lab-based studies that the tendency to opt out of choices between bad candidates is eliminated when participants are asked to reject the worst candidate. Leveraging our experimental findings, we simulate elections and show that rejection-based voting can produce election outcomes that are more representative of the preferences of the electorate. To validate this prediction, we conduct two Prolific surveys of self-reported US Independents before the 2024 US presidential election, and show that people are less likely to respond “undecided” when asked who they will vote against rather than who they will vote for. Our findings help understand when and how people vote, and how to better reveal the preferences of voters who know which candidates they like least but are unwilling to endorse the one they like most.
Data availability
The de-identified experimental and survey data generated in this work are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1799360756.
Code availability
Data analysis and simulation scripts used in this work are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1799360756.
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Acknowledgements
The work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience Award #2309022) to A.S. The authors are grateful to Libby Jenke for providing materials on policy issue questions, to Maximilien Boucher, Daantje de Bruin, Liz Liyu Chen, Meriel Doyle, Mahalia Prater Fahey, and Eva Swartz for assistance and advice pertaining to experimental design, and to Molly J. Crockett, Oriel FeldmanHall, Uma R. Karmarkar, Xiamin Leng, David G. Rand, and Dmitry Taubinsky for helpful feedback.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
Yi-Hsin Su & Amitai Shenhav 1.
Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
Amitai Shenhav
Authors
- Yi-Hsin Su
- Amitai Shenhav
Contributions
A.S. and Y.-H.S. conceived the study. Y.-H.S. programmed the tasks and surveys, collected and analyzed the data. A.S. and Y.-H.S. interpreted the results, wrote the manuscript, and edited the manuscript.
Corresponding authors
Correspondence to Yi-Hsin Su or Amitai Shenhav.
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Cite this article
Su, YH., Shenhav, A. Rejection-based choices discourage people from opting out of voting. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68472-7
Received: 26 November 2024
Accepted: 05 January 2026
Published: 28 January 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68472-7