David Broockman, a political scientist at Stanford, is a co-author of a new study that found that brief conversations can change minds. The finding is similar to one he helped debunk last year, but this time, he and his co-author say, the data are real.Stanford U.
David Broockman and Joshua Kalla last year became political-science stars, but not in the way they wanted.
In 2014, when Mr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla were graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley, they were inspired by a paper by Michael J. LaCour, a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University.
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David Broockman, a political scientist at Stanford, is a co-author of a new study that found that brief conversations can change minds. The finding is similar to one he helped debunk last year, but this time, he and his co-author say, the data are real.Stanford U.
David Broockman and Joshua Kalla last year became political-science stars, but not in the way they wanted.
In 2014, when Mr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla were graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley, they were inspired by a paper by Michael J. LaCour, a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University.
The paper said that short conversations with canvassers could change people’s minds on gay marriage. Science published it in December of that year, and it quickly became the hottest piece of political-science research in recent memory.
Mr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla wanted to expand on that work. Instead, they ended up debunking it.
The duo identified a string of irregularities in the published data. When Mr. LaCour, who was responsible for that data, could not prove that it was authentic, Mr. Green asked for the study to be retracted. The feat won Mr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla instant fame in the research world, but at a cost. The study had been important, not just for its methods but also for its findings. Many took the work of Mr. LaCour and Mr. Green as a sign that under the right circumstances empathy could defeat bias, even among strangers.
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Mr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla now have partly redeemed that loss. On Thursday they announced the findings of a new study, inspired by the one they debunked, that reached similar conclusions about how brief conversations can change minds.
For the new study, well-trained canvassers walked around Miami neighborhoods, knocking on doors and having 10-minute conversations with voters about legal discrimination against transgender people. The activists showed the residents a brief video describing both sides of the debate, encouraged them to talk about their personal experiences of prejudice, and asked where they stood on the issue. The researchers surveyed the same residents three days later, three weeks later, six weeks later, and three months later to see how their convictions had changed.
About 10 percent of respondents expressed more-positive feelings toward transgender people after talking to canvassers. Those changes in attitude were substantial, and they held up through the follow-up surveys. Both transgender and nontransgender canvassers were able to change minds — a difference from Mr. LaCour and Mr. Green’s retracted study, which claimed that voters had found gay canvassers more persuasive on gay rights.
Transparency in Research
The new study, which will also be published in Science, marks the end of a strange opening chapter in the careers of Mr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla.
Mr. Broockman, who is now an assistant professor of political economy at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, was hesitant this week to revisit last year’s episode. When he was a doctoral student, Mr. Broockman ran in the same circles as Mr. LaCour, and the two men discussed the earlier study before its publication. Debunking it had been necessary, but awkward. The Stanford political scientist says he has not talked with Mr. LaCour since then. “At this point,” he said, “looking back is not productive.”
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Mr. Broockman acknowledges the influence of that paper on his own work. For the new study, he and Mr. Kalla combined an array of experimental techniques rather than choosing a single method. Mr. LaCour’s paper planted that idea, said Mr. Broockman. The method they used in the new study, detailed in a companion paper, also requires a smaller sample size than previous experiments, which the authors say could temper some of the ethical criticisms that have dogged experimental political science.
But when it comes to the legacy of the debunked paper, Mr. Broockman prefers to focus on the broader issue of transparency in scientific research. The problem at the heart of last year’s fiasco was that Mr. LaCour never shared his raw data with his colleagues. As a result, they could not properly check his work. Mr. LaCour later claimed to have erased the data, leading many to suspect that it never existed in the first place.
“This study shows how norms encouraging research transparency and replication facilitate science’s self-correction,” Mr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla write in a draft of their new paper. “Science’s data-availability policy and the scientific community’s interest in the generalizability of LaCour and Green’s findings allowed us to discover that study’s irregularities, and, now, to correct the scientific record.”
Mr. Broockman said the data from the new study would be posted online.
Clarification (4/7/2016, 3:30 p.m.): This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Mr. Broockman and Mr. Kalla’s quote about transparency came from a draft of their paper, not the published version.
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Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.
Steve Kolowich was a senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He wrote about extraordinary people in ordinary times, and ordinary people in extraordinary times.
