A popular U.S. radio show and a handful of online news publications have clarified their coverage of a study on same-sex marriage after it was alleged this week that the data cited in their initial reports likely had been fabricated.
“This American Life” host Ira Glass said Wednesday morning that a study claiming a person’s mind can be changed on topics including same-sex marriage and abortion with a simple 22-minute conversation was based on fake data provided by graduate student Michael LaCour.
Glass said that portions of an episode that aired four weeks ago, titled “The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind,” have been amended to remove discussion of LaCour’s dubious research. The show has done the same for its podcast.
“Last month we did a story about canvassers who’d invented a way to go door to door and, in a 22-minute conversation, change people’s minds on issues like same sex marriage and abortion rights,” Glass wrote.
“We did the story because there was solid scientific data published in the journal Science — proving that the canvassers were really having an effect. Yesterday one of the authors of that study, Donald Green, asked Science to retract the study. Some of the data gathered by his co-author seems to have been faked,” he added.
Green is also a Columbia University professor.
“This American Life” isn’t the only media group to revisit its previous coverage of the now-dubious study: The popular radio program is joined by Vox, the Washington Post and Huffington Post in issuing corrections based on the likelihood LaCour faked his findings.
LaCour admitted that he never actually received grant money to conduct his supposed research. He also said that he never paid the survey respondents, contrary to his initial claims. LaCour denied, however, that he had falsified his data. Still, he could not produce the some 9,000-plus surveys he claimed to have collected and analyzed.
Several volunteers participated in the study to collect data for LaCour and Green. What LaCour did later with their findings is what is being disputed.
“This is the thing I want to convey somehow. There was an incredible mountain of fabrications with the most baroque and ornate ornamentation. There were stories, there were anecdotes, my Dropbox is filled with graphs and charts, you’d think no one would do this except to explore a very real data set,” Green wrote. “All that effort that went in to confecting the data, you could’ve gotten the data.”
Green is hopeful, however, that the study’s initial findings may still turn out to be true.
“Just because the data don’t exist to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method of changing minds, doesn’t mean the hypothesis is false. And now the real work begins,” he told Glass.
Should LaCour’s findings prove to be 100 percent fake, this would become the latest in a recent string of hoaxes to have fooled a significant number of newsrooms and reporters.
(h/t Mediaite)
