Not just turnout, but turnaround matters 
 
 In the last several U.S. presidential elections, the campaign mantra has focused on making sure that voters already aligned with one's candidate do get out to vote. There is a long history of unsuccessful efforts to change people's attitudes. Nevertheless, Broockman and Kalla conducted a field experiment showing that Miami voters shifted their attitudes toward transgender individuals and maintained those changed positions for 3 months (see the Perspective by Paluck). 
 
 Science, this issue p. 220; see also p. 147 ||||| Could prejudice be stopped by a quick chat? A new study looked at whether a 10-minute, face-to-face conversation can actually change someone's mind and make them less prejudiced. 
 
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 The study, published today in the journal Science, had 56 canvassers visit 501 voters in the Miami area to discuss issues facing transgender people after an ordinance was passed to protect transgender people from discrimination. Those canvassing were from the Los Angeles LGBT Center and SAVE, a South Florida LGBT organization, and for the study were sent to see if they could find and counteract any backlash to the ordinance. 
 
 To effectively reach residents, the canvassers went through training developed by the Los Angeles LGBT Center that uses techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy to engage with people. 
 
 A similar study published in 2014 that received much public attention was retracted in May 2015 due to problems with the study's data first pointed out by the authors of this new study. The public attention and the subsequent retraction prompted much controversy at the time. 
 
 The canvassers in the new study approached each subject by listening, sharing and prodding them to open up about their own lives. After meeting the resident, the canvassers identified themselves, explained voters could vote for a repeal of the nondiscrimination ordinance and then asked voters to explain their views on transgender people. The canvassers then attempted a new kind of persuasion to get the resident to reconsider transgender issues. They simply asked voters to talk about a time when they were judged negatively for being different. 
 
 "The canvassers then encouraged voters to see how their own experience offered a window into transgender people’s experiences, hoping to facilitate voters’ ability to take transgender people’s perspectives," the study authors wrote. "The intervention ended with another attempt to encourage active processing by asking voters to describe if and how the exercise changed their mind." 
 
 The entire interaction took just about 10 minutes, and lead study author David Broockman said about 70 percent of residents who opened their door finished the entire interaction. After three months, the voters who took part in the initial conversation about transgender issues were much more likely to exhibit "positive" feelings toward transgender people compared to a placebo's group response. The results were not measurably different if the canvasser they talked to was transgender or not. 
 
 Broockman, an assistant professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, said the findings don't point to a "trick" at getting people to agree with you, but seem to show tapping into people's empathy can allow them to reconsider their position. 
 
 "It’s not as easy as here’s a script," Broockman told ABC News. "Similar to cognitive behavioral therapy, some of the ideas are if you ask the right questions and have [people] think through their own opinions and behaviors, that can help people lead them to change their own minds." 
 
 An accompanying perspective published in the journal reviewing Broockman's study said the research is a key step in taking social sciences out of the lab and into the real world to see how real people are affected by these experiments. 
 
 "A face-to-face conversation is not minor when compared with other interventions used to influence political or social attitudes, like 1- to 2-minute mass media advertisements," wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck, associated professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. "Considering both the absolute and relative importance of such a conversation, it seems plausible that a meaningful interaction could take place in a short period of time." 
 
 A similar study published in 2014, also in the journal Science, was later retracted over findings that the study sponsorship was falsified, survey incentives were misrepresented and statistical irregularities in the responses. Broockman and his co-author Joshua Kalla wrote that this new study helps "fill the void" by that retraction by showing with this work that prejudice may be combated with conversation. 
 
 "Several patterns in the present study’s data renew confidence that advocates could productively deploy the intervention strategy that we report," the study authors said. 
 
 Broockman told ABC News that more research is needed to see if this small study can be scaled upwards to affect a larger swath of people. However, Broockman said he was optimistic about these practices being used on a wider scale to help reduce prejudice. ||||| However, in response to these victories, the movement for LGBTQ equality has come under some of the fiercest backlash in its history. Amid widely publicized resistance to marriage equality such as that of Kim Davis in Kentucky, SAVE fought back repeated attempts by Florida lawmakers to pass anti-LGBTQ bills during the 2015-2016 legislative session, including a proposal which would criminalize the use of restrooms by transgender Floridians as well as one which would legally sanction discrimination against LGBTQ Floridians. 
 
 In response to -- and in anticipation of -- a legislative or electoral campaign to repeal nondiscrimination protections or curtail the human rights of LGBTQ people (and particularly people who are transgender), SAVE set out to find out how to best reach voters at a granular level in order to reduce the very biases in which anti-LGBTQ campaigns are grounded. In order to answer this question, the LGBTQ advocacy group, the foremost such organization in South Florida, teamed up to conduct a scientific study with the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Leadership LAB as well as researchers from Stanford and the University of California Berkeley. 
 
 "We found that a single, approximately 10-minute conversation with a stranger produced large reductions in prejudice that persisted for at least the three months studied to date; were resistant to counterargument; and affected political attitudes," said David Broockman, assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 
 
 He and Joshua Kalla, PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley, co-authored the new study. Kalla added that "the decline in prejudice against transgender people is comparable to the prejudice reduction against gay and lesbian people that took more than a decade to achieve." 
 
 The groups achieving the reduction in prejudice, SAVE and the Los Angeles LGBT Center, welcomed the academics' independent measurement of the canvassing program and the publication of their findings. "Our ability to change voters' hearts and minds has been measured, this time for real," said Dave Fleischer, director of the L.A. LGBT Center's Leadership LAB. 
 
 Last year, when Broockman and Kalla were graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, they uncovered data irregularities in a December 2014 Science article studying the Center's same innovative grassroots approach. That study was retracted after they (along with an additional colleague, Professor Peter Aronow of Yale) uncovered the study's flaws. Broockman, Kalla, and Aronow subsequently won a Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for Open Social Science for discovering the discrepancies. 
 
 "Our new study's findings differ from those in the retracted article in an important way," Kalla noted. "Unlike the original study which found only gay canvassers could lastingly reduce prejudice, we find both transgender canvassers and non-transgender allies were effective. Canvassers do not need to be members of an affected group to lastingly reduce prejudice against that group." 
 
 The new study by Broockman and Kalla measured the impact of a voter treatment developed by the L.A. LGBT Center called "deep canvassing." A "deep canvass" conversation differs from a conventional canvass conversation in both length and reciprocity, with the conversations taking 10-15 minutes as the canvasser listens to voters' experiences and responds conversationally rather than reciting a script or talking points. 
 
 From January through June 2015, the L.A. LGBT Center partnered with SAVE, South Florida's largest and longest-serving LGBT organization. Together, they canvassed voters in conservative neighborhoods in Miami six months after the Miami-Dade County Commission voted to include transgender people in the county's Human Rights Ordinance. 
 
 The result: with a rigorous randomized trial -- just like a clinical trial -- Broockman and Kalla found that the deep canvass conversations changed roughly 1 in 10 voters' attitudes about transgender people. The researchers also found an impact on feelings towards transgender people comparable to the decline in prejudice against gay and lesbian people seen between 1998 and 2012. 
 
 In repeated re-measurement, this impact persisted without decay for at least three months. This enduring effect stands in marked contrast to other published measurements of conventional attempts at voter persuasion and prejudice reduction through TV ads or mail or in standard phone or canvass conversations. Other research rarely tracks the long-term impact of such activities. When it does, it has found that these conventional tactics tend to have little or no impact; typically, their impact dissipates within days as voters return to their old points of view. 
 
 Broockman and Kalla found that the conversations were broadly effective: Democratic and Republican voters, liberal and conservative voters, female and male voters, and voters who were Caucasian, Latino, and African-American all exhibited a profound shift. 
 
 "The immediate practical value is that we know we are reducing anti-transgender prejudice here in Miami," said Justin Klecha, director of campaigns at SAVE. SAVE has continued deep canvassing in its ongoing campaign to pass statewide non-discrimination protections and make Miami-Dade County a more accepting place for transgender people to live and work. 
 
 "These conversations are a real game-changer for us here in Florida," said Tony Lima, executive director at SAVE. "Because of these conversations and their impact, we're getting closer to being the first state in the South to pass statewide protections for LGBT people." 
 
 Commenting on the larger significance, Los Angeles LGBT Center CEO Lorri L. Jean said, "When our community faces anti-LGBT ballot measures, it has become abundantly clear we need more than 30-second ads to win. We've long believed that if LGBT people and our allies could meet and engage voters in heartfelt conversations, we could reduce their prejudice. It's exciting to have the data to prove that deep canvassing works, and gratifying to share this powerful new approach with LGBT leaders and progressive allies throughout the country." 
 
 The broader applicability of this approach to other issues is an area for future research. Nevertheless, Broockman and Kalla note that their findings suggest "it may be in campaigns' own best interest to place renewed emphasis on a personal exchange of initially opposing views, even regarding controversial issues and across partisan lines." 
 
 The independent study was made possible by the Gill Foundation, which provided grants for the data measurement costs incurred by Broockman and Kalla for the research published in Science, as well as significant funding for both SAVE and the Los Angeles LGBT Center to conduct the prejudice reduction canvassing. The participation of the Los Angeles LGBT Center was also made possible by generous support from the Walter and Evelyn Haas Jr. Fund and the William B. Wiener Jr. Foundation. 
 
 Neither of the study's authors is affiliated with the Los Angeles LGBT Center or SAVE, nor did they receive compensation from them for the research. 
 
 "The bottom line is that this new study shows we have discovered an important, first insight into how to reduce prejudice," said Fleischer. 
 
 The article in Science is available at the following link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aad9713. 
 
 About SAVE: SAVE is South Florida's foremost advocate for the local LGBTQ community. Our mission is to aid in the election of candidates for political office who will work to promote, protect and defend equality for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. Established in 1993, SAVE accomplishes this mission through education initiatives, outreach, grassroots organizing, and advocacy. Starting with the landmark passage of Miami's Human Rights Ordinance in 1998 to the recent litigation spearheaded by SAVE which resulted in marriage equality in Florida in January 2015, SAVE continues to lead the fight for LGBT equality through grassroots action, political advocacy, and community outreach. 
 
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 SOURCE SAVE ||||| That might seem eerily familiar because it’s the same punchline from one of the most infamous cases of scientific fraud in the last few years. In December 2014, political scientist Michael LaCour published 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. 
 
 The scandal was a huge blow to the LGBT Center—but the new study, published in the same journal, offers redemption. Their methods do work. And in an extra twist, the vindicating results come from the same researchers who uncovered LaCour’s fraud: David Broockman from Stanford University, and Joshua Kalla from the University of California, Berkeley. 
 
 They evaluated the same deep canvassing technique, and found even stronger results. For example, Lacour claimed that the conversations only work if the canvassers are themselves gay; Broockman and Kalla (after, y’know, actually doing some science) found that both transgender and non-transgender canvassers could change minds. 
 
 “This is something that other practitioners now know with confidence that they can adopt because they know it works,” says Broockman. 
 
 * * * 
 
 In November 2008, Californians voted to pass Proposition 8, an amendment that would stop same-sex couples from marrying. It was a huge blow for the LGBT community, not least because all the preceding polling suggested that the proposition would be defeated. “People had really expected to win,” says Dave Fleischer, now director of the Leadership Lab at the L.A. LGBT Center. “In the wake of it, people really wanted to do something, but they didn’t know what.” 
 
 He decided, simply, to talk to the people who had voted for the proposition. “I felt really smart because it was a great idea,” he tells me. “And I felt like an idiot because I’m 61 and I’ve been on the losing side of many elections, but it had never occurred to me to do this before.” 
 
 Over the next year and 13,000 conversations, Fleischer’s team of volunteers tried many strategies for swinging conservative voters to their side. Almost all of them failed. “One very popular idea was to tell our own stories; we thought that by itself would be enough,” he recalls. It wasn’t. “But when we tell a story and make ourselves vulnerable, it makes it easier for the voter to decide that we’re not going to judge them. And it makes it easier for us to elicit their story. That turns out to be by far the most important thing we do. Almost everything we do now is in service of getting the voter to honestly relive their experiences, recall it aloud, and reflect on it.” 
 
 Fleischer was on to something; he knew it. His own internal assessments told him that they were changing opinion, but he didn’t know to what degree, or how long the changes would last. He wanted an independent scientist to evaluate their approach. Enter LaCour. He randomly assigned voters to be canvassed on either gay marriage or recycling, and he was to survey them before and after. But while the canvassers did their thing, LaCour did nothing. And he might have got away with it too, if it weren’t for Broockman and Kalla.
– A new study published in the journal Science suggests that a quick, face-to-face conversation can put a dent in LGBT prejudice. Volunteers who went door to door—aka "deep canvassing," per the Atlantic—"substantially reduced transphobia," say the researchers. "We found that a single, approximately 10-minute conversation with a stranger produced large reductions in prejudice that persisted for at least the three months studied to date," says lead author David Brockman in a press release. And it's all about reaching people through empathy, not wearing them down through arguments or "tricking" them over to your side. "Similar to cognitive behavioral therapy … if you ask the right questions and have [people] think through their own opinions and behaviors, that can help people lead them to change their own minds," Brockman tells ABC News. The study recruited 56 canvassers to receive training developed by the Los Angeles LGBT Center in CBT-based techniques, then sent them to visit 501 voters in the Miami area. The topic: issues facing transgender people after an anti-discrimination ordinance was passed. The canvassers took 10 minutes to explain the ordinance, ask voters for their take on transgender people, and have the voters recall a time when they themselves were judged for being different, thus encouraging "voters to see how their own experience offered a window into transgender people's experiences." They say 70% of those who opened their doors went through the entire exercise, and three months later, they were more likely to show "positive" feelings toward transgender people than those in a control group.