Cenk Uygur
@TheYoungTurks·6.5M subscribers·72.8K videos
Viral Gay Rights Study Faked
Posted
May 21, 2015
Views
69,729
Likes
1,296
Comments
356
Engagement
2.37%
May 21, 2015
69,729
1,296
356
2.37%
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5:36Now PlayingLast year some political science research came out that made many of us, both in the media and the political science world, rethink some of what we thought we knew about the way people are persuade to change their opinion on important issues. It had to do with same sex marriage. Turns out the data was fraudulent.
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John Iadarola (Think Tank) and Jimmy Dore (The Jimmy Dore Show) discuss the details of the story. Should we verify results of studies like this one more carefully? Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
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"Last year, UCLA grad student Michael LaCour and Columbia political scientist Donald Green published a startling finding, based on a experiment they ran: going door to door to try to persuade voters to support same-sex marriage works, they found, and it works especially well when the canvasser delivering the message is gay. They even found spillover effects: people who lived with voters who talked to a gay canvasser grew more supportive of same-sex marriage, too.
This was a really exciting conclusion, for political scientists and laypeople alike. Past research has suggested that people's political views are tribal and largely impervious to rational persuasion. Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan and the University of Exeter's Jason Reifler have conducted multiple studies that show correcting people's incorrect views about, say, the presence of WMDs in Iraq can actually backfire and make them hold their wrong beliefs even more firmly. LaCour and Green's study stood in stark contrast to this literature, suggesting that rational persuasion is actually possible. "It seemed like they'd invented something new," Ira Glass said in a This American Life segment highlighting the study, "a new tool to use to change people's opinions." In my writeup on April 8 of last year, I concluded that "what LaCour and Green found here is kind of miraculous."
The findings were, as it turns out, too miraculous. Green has retracted the study, and asked the journal Science to do the same. LaCour, it turned out, faked the data."
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