How Do You Change Someone’s Mind About Abortion? Tell Them You Had One.

EDITOR'S NOTE: May 20, 2015: On Oct. 6, 2014, Bloomberg Politics published the below article about a canvassing tactic developed by the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Leadership Lab in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8 in 2008, in which volunteers were invited to discuss their own sexual identity to voters at the doorstep. Many of the claims in the article about the effectiveness of the tactic in changing opinions on gay marriage were based on the experimental research performed by UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour, whose partnership with the Leadership Lab was described in the article. Two months after Bloomberg Politics first reported on LaCour’s research, his findings were published in the journal Science in an article co-authored with Columbia University political scientist Don Green.

In May 2015, after attempting and failing to replicate the design of the surveys that LaCour used to measure opinion change among those whom the LGBT Center’s volunteers has canvassed, graduate students David Broockman (of Stanford) and Joshua Kalla (of UC-Berkeley) concluded that the data used by LaCour and Green suffered from “irregularities.” Subsequently, a variety of LaCour’s collaborators and colleagues have raised doubts about whether he ever collected any of the data supposedly analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Leadership Lab’s tactics. On May 19, persuaded that the data LaCour had presented to him had been likely faked, Green requested that Science retract the article they had written on the subject. “Michael LaCour’s failure to produce the raw data,” Green wrote to the journal's editors, “undermines the credibility of the findings.” Bloomberg Politics contacted LaCour, but he had not completed his response.