Political change, face-to-face
In-person talks changed attitudes on transgender people, new research finds.
Two California researchers have found that a roughly 10-minute, face-to-face conversation is enough to change about 1 in 10 voters’ attitudes toward transgender people.
The findings, published in the journal Science, offer a template for canvassers looking to more effectively reach out to voters who may have opposing beliefs. The results also served as vindication for the outreach methods developed by the Los Angeles LGBT Center after a previous study employing its protocols was retracted following allegations that the lead author may have falsified data.
The center began developing its canvassing strategy after the 2008 passage of Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California. Its Leadership Lab made an effort to go to the areas in L.A. County where voters had approved the ban and speak with residents about gay rights. (A federal appeals court in 2010 ruled Proposition 8 was unconstitutional.)
Canvassers asked respondents to recall and discuss a time when they had been treated unfairly because they were seen as different. This practice, called “analogic perspective taking,” seemed to be very effective. But the lab’s director, David Fleischer, wanted to see if researchers could gather hard data to show whether or not the method was working.
“All along the way we tried to measure ourselves ... but there’s simply no substitute for having rigorous independent measurement, so that’s why we sought it out,” Fleischer said.
But very little research has been done on such interactions.
“Of the hundreds of studies on prejudice reduction conducted in recent decades, only [about] 11% test the causal effect of interventions conducted in the real world,” Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton University, who was not involved in the latest study, wrote in a commentary. “Far fewer address prejudice among adults or measure the long-term effects of those interventions.”
Fleischer reached out to Columbia University political science professor Donald Green, who enlisted Michael LaCour, then a graduate student at UCLA, to work with the center and collect online survey data when its volunteers went door-to-door to speak with voters.
LaCour and Green’s findings, that gay canvassers could significantly change voter opinions with face-to-face conversations, were greeted with great fanfare in December 2014. The LGBT center brought on UC Berkeley graduate students David Broockman and Joshua Kalla to follow up the work with a similar study in south Florida. But the pair began to find problems with the research.
“When we were setting about following up ... there were a bunch of things that didn’t look right,” said Broockman, now a Stanford University professor. “We sort of started to get suspicious.”
The survey response rate was unnaturally high; the error rates were strangely low. And when they went to the vendor that had purportedly administered the online surveys, company representatives said they had never worked with LaCour. LaCour said that the survey data had been destroyed in accordance with ethics guidelines.
“His only reason for being on the premises was to measure us,” Fleischer said. “And the thing he did not do was measure us. When we discovered that was the case, we were stunned.”
Broockman, Kalla and Peter Aronow of Yale University sent their report to Green, who requested that Science retract the paper. (LaCour did not agree to the retraction.)
“I am deeply embarrassed by this turn of events and apologize to the editors, reviewers, and readers of Science,” he wrote.
But even as Broockman and Kalla were uncovering the irregularities, they were moving ahead with the Miami-Dade County area survey to see whether the canvassing method could shift attitudes toward transgender people.
This time, they were determined that the experiment be done right.
“When I got to know them, I realized the kind of canvassing they do is quite different than the kind of canvassing I was accustomed to seeing,” Broockman said of the LGBT center, likening its method to cognitive behavioral therapy. “What they’re doing is not trying to tell their sob stories and get empathy; what they’re doing is asking the voter to do mental work and think about the experiences they’ve had.”
For the effort, 56 canvassers with the Los Angeles center and SAVE, a south Florida LGBT organization, visited the doorsteps of 501 voters. Roughly half were asked to think of a time when they had felt judged negatively for being different. The rest, serving as a control group, had a conversation about recycling. Broockman and Kalla followed up with online surveys at three days, three weeks, six weeks and three months.
“They’ve made their entire process enormously transparent,” Paluck noted in an interview, “so that’s one reason to trust in the results. They’re part of a growing number of social scientists who have been responding to concerns about psychology, social science and economics and how un-transparent their results are.”
The study found that roughly 1 in 10 people who were asked to do analogic perspective-taking ended up changing their views on transgender people.
The effect, the researchers said, represented an even greater attitude change than the shift in American attitudes between 1998 and 2012 toward gays and lesbians.
While it might seem like a small number, “1in 10 is kind of miraculous,” Fleischer said.
Unlike the retracted study, which found that gay canvassers were effective at swaying people on same-sex marriage, Broockman and Kalla’s paper found that changing people’s minds on transgender rights did not require that the canvasser be transgender as well. That’s good news, Broockman said, because it means that anyone can do such work effectively.
Green, who was not involved in the latest research, praised the work.
“Dave Fleischer and his colleagues at the LGBT Center ... suffered a terrible blow when LaCour’s panel surveys turned out to be phony, as the center’s outreach efforts were written off by many as naive,” he wrote in an email. “Now the center has a proper scholarly evaluation of its innovative and important work.”
While the LGBT center’s perspective-taking method seems to be effective, many questions remain, Paluck pointed out.
“This study just showed that it could work; it didn’t show exactly why it worked,” Paluck said. “That would be a great follow-up series of studies — to say, OK, what is the key ingredient of this canvassing conversation?”