Changing Minds about Changing Minds: How Results Once Faked Could Actually Be True
It may be time to change our minds about the impossibility of changing people’s minds. Again.
It may be time to change our minds about the impossibility of changing people’s minds. Again.
In January, David Broockman, then a political science Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, found something unusual about a study he and fellow student Joshua Kalla were trying to replicate. The data in the original study, collected by UCLA grad student Michael LaCour and published in Science last December, had shown that gay canvassers, sent door-to-door in California neighborhoods, could, after a brief conversation about marriage equality in which the canvassers disclosed their own sexual orientation, have a lasting impact on voter attitudes on the subject.
A study by graduate students David Broockman (Berkeley) and Joshua Kalla (Yale) on the cupidity of Congressional representatives made recent news because it validated the conventional wisdom: politicians like you better if you give them money. But that wasn’t the real hook.
Posted on March 27, 2014 - 12:22pm