As noted in my previous related post, one of the authors of a late-2014 study which made the nonsensical claim that “a single conversation (can) change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage,” causing "a cascade of opinion change," issued a retraction last week, because the data supporting it was faked. Since it was published in Science Magazine — and because it conveniently fit a leftism-advancing agenda — numerous press outlets ran stories on the study's results.
Now they're all having to run retractions and corrections. Besides the obvious problem that the lies have gotten a long head start, let's look at how the seven original publishers identified by Retraction Watch, as well as the Associated Press, have handled the matter. All too often the answer has been: "Not very well."
The first publication Retraction Watch identified was This Amercan Life. It has added the following text near, but not at, the top of the web page — “NOTE: One of the authors of the study about people changing their minds about gay marriage – covered in the Prologue and Act One of this episode – has asked the journal Science to retract the study because of apparently falsified data. Our story was based on the facts that were available at the time. Now the facts have changed. Ira writes about the retraction at length on our blog.” It is more than a little possible that some readers will peruse this web page's opening sentences and not get to the disclosure about the retraction. Also, the page's title ("The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind") has not changed.
The handling of the matter at the New York Times is unacceptable. Below the current article's title, there is a very easy to miss "Editor's Note Appended" indicator. At the bottom of the article, the following language appears: “Editors’ Note: May 20, 2015 — “An article on Dec. 12, 2014, reported on a study published by the journal Science that said gay political canvassers could change conservative voters’ views on gay marriage by having a brief face-to-face discussion about the issue. The editor in chief of the journal said on Wednesday that the senior author of the study had now asked that the report be retracted because of the failure of his fellow author to produce data supporting the findings.”
The Wall Street Journal also didn't handle it correction very well. Once can read the headline ("Gay Marriage: How to Change Minds") and the subheadline ("A recent study shows that a brief meeting can change people’s opinions about same-sex marriage") and leave for another page before reading the following language: “NOTE TO READERS: According to an Associated Press report, data in the Science magazine study to which the article below alludes have come under question, as one of the authors of the study has asked the magazine to retract it.”
The Washington Post also has not acquitted itself well. One has to scroll past the still original headline ("One conversation can change minds on same-sex marriage, study finds") and a huge "rainbow flag" photo before seeing the following: “Editor’s Note: Since the publication of this post on a study examining how easily people’s minds can be changed concerning same-sex marriage, a co-author has disavowed its findings. Donald P. Green is seeking a retraction of the study from the journal Science, which originally published the research.” The Post’s original story notes that David Fleischer, who worked with LaCour to fake the data, was troubled at the 2008 passage of Proposition 8 in California affirming the traditional definition of marriage. Fleischer reportedly asked himself, “What could we do to change people’s minds on this subject?” The answer was clearly, “We’ve got to make stuff up.”
The "effort" at the Los Angeles Times is the worst of the bunch by miles, and seems to have been designed to ensure that no one will see it. The only evidence of a correction is an “update” buried at the bottom of the related web page, set off from the original article and presented in a smaller and more compressed font than the original article's text: “UPDATE May 20, 2015: Science published an 'Expression of Concern' about the study reported on here. 'Serious questions have been raised about the validity' of the report, which claimed that skeptics of same-sex marriage could be persuaded to accept it after talking with a gay lobbyist for 20 minutes. One of the study’s co-authors, Donald Green, said he no longer has confidence in the data and has requested that the study be retracted.”
The original writeup at Science Friday was brief. The notice of retraction appears before the article’s content in a much larger font, and reads as follows: “UPDATE, May 20, 2015: The research discussed by Michael LaCour, entitled ”When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” has been retracted. Click here for more information from Retraction Watch. Click here for coverage by Vox.com.”
To its credit, Vox has changed its headline to “Popular study on same-sex marriage attitudes was based on fabricated information,” and included the following introductory text:
Update: It turns out that the Michael LaCour and Donald Green study described here really was “miraculous”: it wasn’t true. Two other political scientists, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, tried to conduct an extension of the study, and ran into a number of irregularities, not least an unusually high response rate among survey participants. When they contacted the survey firm they believed performed the study and asked to speak with an employee believed to have helped, the firm said it was unfamiliar with the project, had no employee by that name, and didn’t have the capabilities to run many aspects of the study.
Eventually, LaCour confessed to “falsely describing at least some of the details of the data collection.” Green retracted the study on his website and has requested that Science, the journal that published the study, retract it as well. LaCour was set to become an assistant professor at Princeton this July, but Retraction Watch’s Ivan Oransky notes that this position has been scrubbed from LaCour’s personal website.
In the interest of full disclosure, my original post describing the study is below. But in light of the retraction, don’t believe any of its findings. See here for a longer explanation of how LaCour faked his data.
The Huffington Post, to it credit, also changed its headline to a crystal clear “Researcher Disavows Study On How Personal Contact Can Change Opinion On Same-Sex Marriage.”
Finally, the Associated Press published the following correction on May 21:
CORRECTION: GAY MARRIAGE-CANVASSERS STORY
NEW YORK (AP) -- In a story published Dec. 11, 2014, The Associated Press reported that researchers from Columbia University and the University of California-Los Angeles had found that openly gay canvassers were far more effective than straight canvassers in shifting voters' views toward support for same-sex marriage. On Tuesday, Columbia Professor Donald Green asked that Science magazine retract the study; Green said when their conclusions were challenged, he and his co-author Michael LaCour were unable to produce their raw data, which he said had been accidentally deleted.
This afternoon, an AP dispatch reported that Science magazine itself "on Thursday formally retracted a highly publicized article about a study gauging the ability of openly gay canvassers to shift voters' views toward support for same-sex marriage."
Unfortunately, given the nature of AP's distribution, its original December 11, 2014 item on the study remains out there in its original form with no sign of a correction anywhere. Two such examples are here and here, the second being the right-leaning Washington Times.
Additionally, Jesse Singal at New York Magazine's Science of Us blog reported that an award Michael LaCour included in his curriculum vitae apparently doesn't even exist, and that he caught LaCour red-handed falsely claiming that the listed award was never included in his CV.
Thus, the media follow-up has clearly been uneven and largely unacceptable, further illustrating how difficult it is to undo a lie which has gone around the world for months — especially when those who propagated it were so eager to believe the original story. It’s unlikely that the truth will ever reach even a majority of those who believed the original lie.
As I've already noted, the LaCour-Green findings didn’t pass the smell test from the very start. Putting “science” lipstick on this pig shouldn’t have worked. As This American Life noted, “It’s rare for people to change what they believe, and if they do it, it’s usually a long process.” Why did the press automatically think that a heated issue like same-sex “marriage” could somehow be different? I think the answer is that they wanted it that way.
Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, one of the leading weekly peer-reviewed general medical journals, caused quite a stir last week when he said that "much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." With episodes like this one and the myriad other problems he describes at the link, that may be an underestimate.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
