Science Fiction: Michael LaCour's Gay Rights Canvassing Hoax Shows the Limits of Peer Review
May 21, 2015
In June of 2013, Columbia University political scientist Donald Green was approached by UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour with some remarkable findings about canvassing work done by Los Angeles LGBT Center: Empathetic conversations between gay canvassers and local residents were able to make lasting converts to the cause of marriage equality. Straight canvassers also had an impact but on a much smaller level.
LaCour’s findings stood in contrast to a large body of scholarship that shows canvassing rarely changes public opinion in any sustained way. The journalistic rule to be wary of a story that seems too good to be true is one that academics could benefit from as well.
“I thought they were so astonishing that the findings would only be credible if the study were replicated,” Green recently told the website Retraction Watch. LaCour and Green’s article, “When Contact Changes Minds: An Experiment on Transmission of Support for Gay Equality,” was published in the December 2014 issue of the prestigious journal Science. It immediately caught the attention of journalists and political activists, serving as the basis for an episode of This American Life, and articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Politics, and other publications. According to Ira Glass, host of This American Life, the study seemed to show that the canvassers of the LGBT Center had “invented something new, a new tool to change people’s opinions.”
Unfortunately, it increasingly looks like what was invented was not a new tool of persuasion but rather the evidence of the study itself. Challenged by subsequent researchers who have not been able to replicate the findings of the 2014 article and evidence that LaCour made false claims about funding for his research, Green has asked Science to retract the article.
In trying to make sense of this fiasco, it’s important to realize that the implicit trust Green placed in LaCour was perfectly normal and rational. While science includes gatekeeping measures to weed out inferior research, in their day-to-day collaborative activities scientists have to assume that the people they are working with are not pathological liars, that they won’t simply make up data. This is the kind of social cohesiveness that led one professor to tell This American Life, “I trust anything Don Green publishes.” In this particular case, that trust was misplaced but some level of collegial confidence is the necessary lubricant to allow research to take place.
The publication of so dubious an article is likely to embarrass the many parties involved; not just Green but also the LGBT Center, the journal Science, and the fellow social scientists who greenlit the article during the peer review process, among others. While the publication of the article is an embarrassment to the journal Science, it is paradoxically a vindication of the discipline itself.
Read more:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121872/michael-lacours-gay-rights-canvassing-hoax
The study on gay marriage that was too good to be true
May 21, 2015
It was the study that some said could rewrite the political rule book. Forget focus groups, road-to-Damascus moments and negative campaign advertising. What if you could change people's minds on an issue such as gay marriage simply by ... talking to them?
Radical. But also too good to be true, now that the study - widely circulated in the US - has been retracted by one of its authors after his co-author allegedly admitted to fabricating data.
In a memo to the respected academic journal Science, which published the paper, Columbia University professor Donald Green said he was "deeply embarrassed" at holes in the research found by peers at other US colleges.
The outcome has disappointed marriage equality campaigners in Australia and abroad.
Australian Marriage Equality director Rodney Croome said supporters of same-sex marriage should not be discouraged from telling their stories and trying to persuade opponents.
The bulk of the work behind the study - When contact changes minds - was undertaken by a PhD student at the University of California Los Angeles, Michael LaCour. Its findings were striking: that 20-minute conversations with voters opposed to gay marriage could turn them into enthusiastic supporters of marriage equality.
The research also contended that, if the person conducting the interview was gay or lesbian, the voter was likely to remain convinced about same-sex marriage when interviewed again nine months later - rather than reverting to their original views.
"Contact with minorities coupled with discussion of issues pertinent to them is capable of producing a cascade of opinion change," Mr LaCour and Professor Green concluded.
The study was reported by news agencies including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and radio program This American Life. Its implications were enormous, bucking widely accepted wisdom that most people do not really change their minds, or that, if they do, the process is slow or beyond the sphere of political influence.
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/the-stu...-was-too-good-to-be-true-20150521-gh6fi7.html
Nothing new to see here folks, just a bunch of homosexual activists trying to influence public opinion on same sex marriage by making stuff up.
Homosexual activist and fraudulent researcher Michael LaCour