(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Hey, did you hear about that study last year, where some researchers claimed to find that a 20-minute doorstep conversation with skeptical voters could change views on same-sex marriage? It was published in the tabloids and featured on This American Life? And it turned out it was all a fraud, that one of the authors of the paper made up the data and the other author had to retract it from the journal? Remember that?
OK, good. Well, here’s some news. David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, two of the people who figured out about that earlier study being faked, then up and ran their own study, and look what they found:
A single approximately 10-minute conversation encouraging actively taking the perspective of others can markedly reduce prejudice for at least 3 months. We illustrate this potential with a door-to-door canvassing intervention in South Florida targeting antitransgender prejudice. . . . 56 canvassers went door to door encouraging active perspective-taking with 501 voters at voters’ doorsteps. A randomized trial found that these conversations substantially reduced transphobia. . . . These effects persisted for 3 months, and both transgender and nontransgender canvassers were effective. The intervention also increased support for a nondiscrimination law, even after exposing voters to counterarguments.
Wow. As I wrote at the sister blog, this has to cause us to rethink the idea that persuasion is so difficult—at least for fluid issues such as gay rights where public attitudes are changing fast.
Betsy Levy Paluck wrote an accompanying article summarizing the research on persuasion:
What do social scientists know about reducing prejudice in the world? In short, very little. Of the hundreds of studies on prejudice reduction conducted in recent decades, only ~11% test the causal effect of interventions conducted in the real world. Far fewer address prejudice among adults or measure the long-term effects of those interventions.
Also, I’d expect persuasion to be less effective in the real world than in Broockman and Kalla’s experiment, because in a live political setting you’ll see efforts at persuasion from both sides.
Finally, let me remind you that when the suggestion came up to replicate the LaCour and Green study, I was dismissive:
Ulp. There are lots and lots of studies people are interested in doing, and I’m sure this activist group in Los Angeles has a long to-do list. Do you really think they should spend their precious time, money, and human resources to study an idea that is contradicted by an entire 900-paper literature and whose only claim to plausibility was a made-up experiment?? . . . You gotta be kidding.
I was dismissive, and I was wrong. I’m glad nobody was listening to me on this one!
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