Visualizing Minds in Motion: Using Process Tracing to Quantify Voters’ Decision Conflict in the 2024 Presidential Election by Healogix LLC

Making important decisions is part of everyday life, yet understanding how people arrive at their choices has remained a persistent challenge in Behavioral Science, market research, and related fields (e.g., cognitive science). Traditional research methods, which rely heavily on surveys and interviews, often miss the subtle conflicts and uncertainties that shape humans' decision-making processes.

To address this methodological gap, the Behavioral Science team at Healogix developed Process Tracing, a breakthrough method that visualizes cognitive processes in real time. This innovative approach measures mouse movements while people make choices, revealing patterns that signal confidence, uncertainty, and changes of mind-- insights that people often cannot express in words alone (e.g., for seminal work on this topic, see Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

We demonstrated this method's power during the 2024 presidential election through a two-wave study examining healthcare policy views. In Wave 1 (September 2024), we analyzed voters' real-time mouse movements as they evaluated candidates' healthcare positions. When we followed up after the election (Wave 2), we found that many voters had changed their actual votes from their original stated intentions. Crucially, our Process Tracing metrics had predicted who would likely change their minds - hesitant mouse movements, frequent direction changes, and indirect paths to choices in Wave 1 identified voters most likely to vote differently in Wave 2. Overall, these behavioral signals explained 23% of the discrepancy between stated intentions and actual voting behavior, capturing decision uncertainty that traditional polling missed entirely.

This technology marks a significant advance in Behavioral Science, offering new ways to understand and support decision-making across healthcare, public policy, and other critical domains where understanding human behavior matters most. Process Tracing's ability to reveal unconscious decision processes provides unprecedented insight into how people navigate complex choices, enabling more accurate prediction of real-world behaviors.