Study re Changing Minds on Gay Marriage Retracted

You may have heard about this – the story has been around for a couple weeks, and I’ve been meaning to mention it.

In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author. 

[3:45 p.m. Eastern, 5/28/15: Please see an update on this story; the study has been retracted.] 

Donald Green, of Columbia, and Michael LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA, published the paper, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,” in December 2014. The study received widespread media attention, including from This American Life, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post,  The Los Angeles Times, Science Friday, Vox, and HuffingtonPost, as LaCour’s site notes.

Beyond the subject matter, the story on how the fakery was uncovered is interesting.