Posted on 05/20/2015 11:13:37 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
In December, I wrote a post about a groundbreaking new study published in Science,which had profound implications for the gay rights movement. The study’s researchers claimed that a mere 20-minute conversation about the importance of marriage equality could convince same-sex marriage opponents to support gay rights. People who spoke with straight canvassers demonstrated a slight boost in tolerance;those who spoke with gay canvassers demonstrated—and retained—an even more significant boost in support for gay rights.
Does that sound too good to be true? It was. The study was co-authored by Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University,and Michael J. LaCour, then a political science Ph.D. candidate at UCLA. LaCour, it turns out, fabricated the data—and masked his deception so well that nobody,not even statisticians, noticed it for months. When two graduate students,hoping to extend the study,took a closer look at LaCour’s data, however,they realized something was amiss and ultimately cried foul. Green quickly asked Science to retract the story,writing that he was “deeply embarrassed by this turn of events.”..
I’m at once disappointed and a little relieved to discover that the Science study relied upon made-up data. Obviously,I’m disappointed because the study pointed the way toward a brighter future,suggesting a method by which equality advocates could persuade more people to support gay rights. But I’m also a bit relieved to see the study’s thesis—homophobia is so flimsy that a front-porch chat can cure it—discredited. That idea seemed to lie behind Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s obnoxious 2014 opinion upholding same-sex marriage bans. Why, Sutton asked, should the courts vindicate gay couple’s rights?....Sutton suggested that he was actually doing gays a favor by ruling against them, since his decision would force them to go vindicate their rights through the democratic process, changing “hearts and minds, even souls” in the process:.....
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
"Donald P. Green (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1988) is the author of four books and more than 100 essays. Professor Green's research interests span a wide array of topics: voting behavior, partisanship, campaign finance, hate crime, and research methods. Much of his current work uses field experimentation to study the ways in which political campaigns mobilize and persuade voters.
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and was awarded the Heinz I. Eulau Award for best article published in the American Political Science Review during 2009. In 2010, he founded the Experimental Research section of the American Political Science Association and served as its first president.
Prior to joining the Columbia faculty in 2011, he taught at Yale University, where he directed the Institution for Social and Policy Studies from 1996 to 2011."
UCLA still has this up: Michael J. LaCour "
My dissertation addresses the extent to which it is possible to change peoples’ minds on divisive social issues. In this effort, I designed, secured funding, and implemented a series of longitudinal field experiments assessing the effect of persuasive communications on voters’ policy preferences and attitudes toward minority groups. To do this, I built an Internet panel of 11,498 voters from which multiple samples of networked individuals could be surveyed and unobtrusively re-surveyed to track the persistence and spread of causal effects over the course of a year. Between survey measurements, I embedded a series of placebo-controlled field experiments, where designated individuals were contacted by different types of messengers. Finally, I sustained the project long enough to observe how the conversations delivered at the door interact with landmark policy events on the same topics. This design enables me to not only estimate the magnitude, persistence, and transmission of effects; it is also capable of assessing the immediate and enduring effects of direct and secondhand contact with minority groups.
The results from six different field experiments across two domains (gay equality and abortion rights) demonstrate that it not only matters what messages canvassers’ deliver but also who delivers it.
For example, in my job market paper, I report results from a field experiment assessing whether gay or straight canvassers were more effective at encouraging voters to support same-sex marriage. I find that both straight and gay canvassers produce short-term change in support for same-sex marriage, but only gay canvassers produce enduring effects that also spread to other members of the household.
When the Supreme Court announced its reversal of Proposition 8, making gay marriage in California legal, everyone’s support for gay marriage increased, but among those people who were canvassed a month earlier by a openly gay person (as opposed to a straight canvasser), the effects were amplified. A mechanism for attitude change is suggested by the fact that gay canvassers also brought about a substantial and enduring change in attitudes toward gay and lesbian people more generally. As you may know, researchers in many fields have usually failed in experimental efforts to bring about lasting attitude change on cultural issues, which is why I think my results might be publishable in Science.........."
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Groundbreaking new study published in Science (and circulated......)
All one needs to do is fund someone to publish a "study" and then have the state media circulate it so politicians and policy makers can run with it.
Science has been destructively politicized. It cannot be trusted.
Yesterday in the NYT: This Antarctic ice shelf could collapse by 2020, NASA says; Obama's demand for more action on Climate Change Obama Recasts Climate Change as a Peril With Far-Reaching Effects.
Here's a different one from yesterday that directly disputes the NYT's piece and Obama's lies:
Forbes: Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat
".....A 10-percent decline in polar sea ice is not very remarkable, especially considering the 1979 baseline was abnormally high anyway. Regardless, global warming activists and a compliant news media frequently and vociferously claimed the modest polar ice cap retreat was a sign of impending catastrophe. Al Gore even predicted the Arctic ice cap could completely disappear by 2014.
In late 2012, however, polar ice dramatically rebounded and quickly surpassed the post-1979 average. Ever since, the polar ice caps have been at a greater average extent than the post-1979 mean.
Now, in May 2015, the updated NASA data show polar sea ice is approximately 5 percent above the post-1979 average.
During the modest decline in 2005 through 2012, the media presented a daily barrage of melting ice cap stories. Since the ice caps rebounded – and then some – how have the media reported the issue?.......
Oh, those poor Polar Bears!
Where will they swim??!
(It's always something, all they have to do is to figure out how to work it into the narrative.)
Well played.
I bet most studies in favor of homosexuality are faked because how can one be born homosexual with the existence of bi-sexuals/transgendered/gender fluid/intersex...
Making up data, on the other hand, is a cardinal academic sin. LaCour should be expelled, kicked out of his program and academia for good.
It's not really a grad student effect, though. It's a human being effect:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool."
-- Richard Feynman.
Researchers in the humanities altogether too often don't understand that they must take extraordinary measures to keep themselves from simply getting the results they want.
>> marriage equality
The inability to differentiate the sphincter from the vagina.
Since is dissertation relied on fabricated data, I assume that UCLA will be rescinding LaCour’s Ph.D.?
Sadly enough the younger generation is ahistorical so have little problem with gay marriage. I would never attend a gay marriage. It would make my stomach churn
Was this study queer reviewed before publication?
Andrew Gelman: Fake study on changing attitudes: Sometimes a claim that is too good to be true, isn’t
"....Not to spoil the suspense or anything, but what really happened was that the data were faked by first author LaCour. Co-author Green (my colleague at Columbia) had taken his collaborator’s data on faith; once he found out, he firmly retracted the article. Details at Retraction Watch.
....It’s an interesting aspect of science, that we can work hard and come up with stories for anything. Indeed, I published a political science paper several years ago that I later retracted, not because the data were faked, but because we had miscoded one of the variables, and it completely destroyed our analyses and conclusions. So these things happen........
Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis; Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks; and Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.
Update, 2 p.m. Eastern, 5/20/15: This post’s popularity crashed our servers, and we have now upgraded. Apologies for the interruption. In the meantime, we have heard from Science, who sent this comment from editor in chief Marcia McNutt, noting that the journal will be posting an Expression of Concern:
Lies.
IF both institutions have any veneers of integrity left.
LaCour, of course, will experience a very short ‘unemployed’ period, then he will be quickly gobbled up by other leftist organization and we will have another Van Jones in the making.
Pollsters hear what they want to hear. There are very few “neutral” and truly unbiased polls now circulating. Many of them have already become “push polls”, asked in such a way that the predetermined outcome is all but assured.
Based on logic alone, there is no way that the “acceptance” of the gay agenda in any way benefits society as a whole. The primary purpose is to demolish as much of the existing social contract as is possible, then build a new “consensus” around all the new-found nuances on “equality” and “social justice”.
Now that is funny! Well done.
This whole “extended conversation” thing reminds me of tricks canvassers for charities do to try and get you to commit (I mean say “Yes”) so they can send you a pledge bill in the mail. They often record that word where they can to prove you pledged something.
BTW, if you do not pay that bill when you get the ‘pledge’ follow-up, those suckers will send it to collection.
My standard line to ANYBODY for ANY charity when I get a phone call at home is “I’m sorry, I don’t give money over the phone.” And, then I hang up regardless of what they’re trying to tell me.
Here is a question I like to ask liberals, It has been proposed that homosexuality is something you're born with. If abortion is legalized to, "on demand" status could it be used to terminate homosexual embryos?
“Outed” huh.
That’s the problem with movements based on lies. They inevitably wear out their credibility.
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