People favor the extremes in close political battles Nov. 2 (UPI) -- A new study from Carnegie Mellon show people tend to prefer extreme political candidates when the election is highly competitive and less when the election isn't. The study, which will be featured in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in January, used three experiments. The first used a hypothetical election and found the more "hotly contested" an election was, the more likely a person would pick an candidate with extreme views. The second was done during the race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in 2012, and they told the participants the race was close. Once the participants knew that, they would tell them one of the candidates had certain extreme views, and they found they liked them more after that. The third focused on the reasoning behind the choices. We found that when people believe that there is greater competition between their group and another group, they want to make clear what the differences are between the two groups. To make the distinction between the two groups clear, they choose leaders who are extreme in their views," Jin Wook Chang, a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon, said. The study found the media can play a role in people's perception of how close a race is, which will determine how extreme they go.