“When Contact Changes Minds”: An Autopsy

In December 2014, Science Magazine published an article by Donald P. Green and Michael J. LaCour that claimed that a 20 minute conversation with a gay person could change that person’s minds about same-sex marriage. This discovery made national headlines and was considered a major breakthrough in the field of Political Science. However, in the following months since it had been released, it was made apparent that the data used to arrive at this conclusion was falsified. This blog post will take an in-depth look at how scientists were able the determine that this data was fraudulent.

The motivation for the research comes from the contact hypothesis which states that hostility towards out-groups (minorities) diminishes when people from different groups interact with each other. The idea was to find people who had views against same-sex marriage, send survey canvassers to their house to have a conversation with them about same-sex marriage. The canvassers would either identify themselves as gay or straight, and then follow up in the future with another survey.

The methodology of the research was as follows: They started with an initial online survey (wave 1) for registered voters in the southern California area. In order to obtain multiple voters per household, individuals were given money if they referred friends and family to take the survey as…