This was the biggest political science study of last year. It was a complete fraud.
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."
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