In early 2015, a team of 56 volunteers knocked on the doors of conservative voters in Miami, Florida to talk about transgender rights. Local officials had recently passed a law that protected transgender people from discrimination, but LGBT organizations were concerned about backlash, repeals, and counter-legislation (of the kind recently seen in North Carolina).
So volunteers from the Los Angeles LGBT Center and SAVE, a Florida LGBT organization asked voters what they thought about the recent law? Would they watch this video and talk about their reactions? Could they talk about a time when they had been on the receiving end of negative judgment or stigma? Did that help them to understand what a transgender life is like? Did that change their views?
It was a deliberate strategy, and it worked—durably and dramatically. These ten-minute conversations, known as “deep canvassing,” substantially reduced prejudice against transgender people for at least three months, even in the face of anti-transgender ad campaigns. Not all the voters were swayed, but on average, they experienced a drop in transphobia greater than the fall in homophobia among average Americans from 1998 to 2012. The canvassers, through ten-minute chats, had produced the equivalent of 14 years of social change.
That might seem eerily familiar because it’s the same punchline fromone of the most infamous cases of scientific fraud in the last few years. In December 2014, political scientist Michael LaCourpublished a paper in which he supposedly evaluated the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s canvassers and found that they strongly and persistently reduced prejudices against same-sex marriage. Five months later, it turned out that his data was fabricated. His paper, exposed as a sham, was swiftly retracted.
[For more of this story, written by Ed Yong, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/sci...ce-prejudice/477105/]
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