Paper on ‘Changing Minds’ on Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Retracted, Media Outlet Retractions Abound

Examples of scientific fakery in matters relating to sexuality and especially homosexuality go back decades, all the way to Alfred Kinsey.

One of the more recent such underhanded episodes, involving a paper originally published in December 2014, was called “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality.” It claimed that “a single conversation (can) change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage.” That assertion made by a “layman” wouldn’t pass the smell test with most people. But because the paper was published in Science Magazine (“The World’s Leading Journal of Scientific Research, Global News and Commentary”), it gained a now-obviously clearly undeserved veneer of credibility.

Retraction Watch (“Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process”), a web site begun by two gentlemen who believe “that retractions, and corrections for that matter, need more publicity,” noted that the following news outlets published reports citing the study’s results:

… This American Life, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post,  The Los Angeles Times, Science Friday, Vox, and HuffingtonPost,

The authors weren’t talking about a low-percentages achievement in changing minds. While the study’s abstract presents no specifics, it claims that “Contact with minorities coupled with discussion of issues pertinent to them is capable of producing a cascade of opinion change.”

Well, it did that because, to summarize the findings in a painfully long identification of irregulariies in the study published on Tuesday by academics who attempted to replicate and extend it: ”[T]he dataset … was not collected as described.” In layman’s terms, it was faked.

This particular paragraph from that review of irregularities indicates how little genuine work was involved in producing the original result (“LaCour and Green” are the authors of the original study; bolds are mine throughout this post):

May 15, 2015. Our initial questions about the dataset arose as follows. The response rate of the pilot study was notably lower than what LaCour and Green (2014) reported. Hoping we could harness the same procedures that produced the original study’s high reported response rate, we attempt to contact the survey firm we believed had performed the original study and ask to speak to the staffer at the firm who we believed helped perform Study 1 in LaCour and Green (2014). The survey firm claimed they had no familiarity with the project and that they had never had an employee with the name of the staffer we were asking for. The firm also denied having the capabilities to perform many aspects of the recruitment procedures described in LaCour and Green (2014). 

Four days later, Green who claims to have been duped by LaCour, indicated that the paper had been retracted at his curriculum vitae web page. Readers will be interested to see where he categorized the study:

But of course.

Green has admitted to the following, as told to Retraction Watch:

Several weeks after the canvassing launched in June 2013, Michael LaCour showed me his survey results. I thought they were so astonishing that the findings would only be credible if the study were replicated. (I also had some technical concerns about the “thermometer” measures used in the surveys.) Michael LaCour and Dave Fleischer [an "LBGT canvasser" — Ed.] therefore conducted a second experiment in August of 2013, and the results confirmed the initial findings.

I did not have IRB (Internal Review Board) approval for the study from my home institution, I took care not to analyze any primary data — the datafiles that I analyzed were the same replication datasets that Michael LaCour posted to his website. Looking back, the failure to verify the original Qualtrics data was a serious mistake.

The first excerpted paragraph is an admission that Green let the guys who faked data the first time around fake it a second time to satisfy his concerns. The second paragraph is an admission that he didn’t do his due diligence. Perhaps Green thought that the results were too good to check.

So how are some of the publications involved handling the retraction of a discredited “scientific” study which had been favorable to many of those outlets sacrosanct cause?

This Amercan Life, noted at the top of the web page — “NOTE: One of the authors of the study about people changing their minds about gay marriage – covered in the Prologue and Act One of this episode – has asked the journal Science to retract the study because of apparently falsified data. Our story was based on the facts that were available at the time. Now the facts have changed. Ira writes about the retraction at length on our blog.”

New York Times, at the bottom of the related web page, with only a neutral “Editor’s Note Appended” indication at the top — “Editors’ Note: May 20, 2015 — “An article on Dec. 12, 2014, reported on a study published by the journal Science that said gay political canvassers could change conservative voters’ views on gay marriage by having a brief face-to-face discussion about the issue. The editor in chief of the journal said on Wednesday that the senior author of the study had now asked that the report be retracted because of the failure of his fellow author to produce data supporting the findings.”

Wall Street Journal, at the top — “NOTE TO READERS: According to an Associated Press report, data in the Science magazine study to which the article below alludes have come under question, as one of the authors of the study has asked the magazine to retract it.”

Washington Post, at the top but below the article’s opening picture — “Editor’s Note: Since the publication of this post on a study examining how easily people’s minds can be changed concerning same-sex marriage, a co-author has disavowed its findings. Donald P. Green is seeking a retraction of the study from the journal Science, which originally published the research.” The Post’s coverage notes that the aforementioned David Fleischer, troubled at Proposition 8′s passage in 2008, asked himself, “What could we do to change people’s minds on this subject?” The answer was clearly, “We’ve got to make stuff up.”

Los Angeles Times, in an “update” buried at the bottom of the related web page that no one will see unless they’re specifically looking for it — “UPDATE May 20, 2015: Science published an “Expression of Concern” about the study reported on here. “Serious questions have been raised about the validity” of the report, which claimed that skeptics of same-sex marriage could be persuaded to accept it after talking with a gay lobbyist for 20 minutes. One of the study’s co-authors, Donald Green, said he no longer has confidence in the data and has requested that the study be retracted.”

Science Friday — Its original writeup was brief. The notice of retraction before the article’s content begins reads as follows: “UPDATE, May 20, 2015: The research discussed by Michael LaCour, entitled ”When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” has been retracted. Click here for more information from Retraction Watch. Click here for coverage by Vox.com.”

Vox — To its credit, the online publication has changed the headline to “Popular study on same-sex marriage attitudes was based on fabricated information,” and included the following introductory text:

Update: It turns out that the Michael LaCour and Donald Green study described here really was “miraculous”: it wasn’t true. Two other political scientists, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, tried to conduct an extension of the study, and ran into a number of irregularities, not least an unusually high response rate among survey participants. When they contacted the survey firm they believed performed the study and asked to speak with an employee believed to have helped, the firm said it was unfamiliar with the project, had no employee by that name, and didn’t have the capabilities to run many aspects of the study.

Eventually, LaCour confessed to “falsely describing at least some of the details of the data collection.” Green retracted the study on his website and has requested that Science, the journal that published the study, retract it as well. LaCour was set to become an assistant professor at Princeton this July, but Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky notes that this position has been scrubbed from LaCour’s personal website.

In the interest of full disclosure, my original post describing the study is below. But in light of the retraction, don’t believe any of its findings. See here for a longer explanation of how LaCour faked his data.

Huffington Post — HuffPo also changed its headline to “Researcher Disavows Study On How Personal Contact Can Change Opinion On Same-Sex Marriage.”

This is all nice, but it illustrates how lies went around the world for months before the truth came out, and how it’s unlikely that the truth will ever reach all of those who have been lied to.

As I noted earlier, the findings didn’t pass the smell test from the very start. Putting “science” lipstick on this pig shouldn’t have worked. As This American Life noted, “It’s rare for people to change what they believe, and if they do it, it’s usually a long process.” Why did these people think that a heated issue like same-sex “marriage” could somehow be different? I think the answer is that they wanted it that way.