Fraud
DAVID MALAMED Fake Data, Fake Science It was a stunning result, one that garnered extensive na-
tional media attention. “The messenger, it turned out, was just as important as the message,” the magazine noted. The results highly impressed David Broockman, a third-year political science doctoral student at UC Berkeley. He met with LaCour to discuss the findings, “which flew in the face of just about every established tenet of political persuasion,” the New York Times said. Out of admiration, Broockman decided to attempt to repli-
cate the results. He began by calculating the cost of the survey. LaCour had told him that some 10,000 people had been can- vassed and each was paid about US$100. A million-dollar budget? How could that be, Broockman wondered? “He sent out a request for proposal to a bunch of polling
by Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University, and Michael LaCour, a graduate student at UCLA. Its findings, which focused on political persuasion, were contrary to existing beliefs about the topic. “Persuasion is famously difficult: study aſter study — not to mention much of world history — has shown that, when it comes to controversial subjects, people rarely change their minds, especially if those subjects are important to them,” The New Yorker reported about the controversial paper in 2015. “You may think that you’ve made a convincing argument about gun control, but your crabby uncle isn’t likely to switch sides in the debate. Beliefs are sticky, and hardly any approach, no matter how logical it may be, can change that.” Not according to the paper, however. The authors reported
I
that over a nine-month period in 2013 they had sent canvassers from a Los Angeles LGBT centre into neighbourhoods where voters had supported Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. “The canvassers followed standardized scripts meant to convince those voters to change their minds through non- confrontational, one-on-one contact,” the magazine reported. “The survey highlighted a surprising distinction. When can- vassers didn’t talk about their own sexual orientations, voters’ shiſts in opinion were unlikely to last. But if canvassers were openly gay — if they talked about their sexual orientations with voters — the voters’ shiſts in opinion were still in evidence in the survey nine months later.”
56 | CPA MAGAZINE | MARCH 2016
N DECEMBER 2014, THE PRESTIGIOUS JOURNAL Science pub- lished a provocative paper, “When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality,”
firms, describing the survey he wanted to run and asking how much it would cost,” the Times said. “Most said they couldn’t pull off that sort of study, and definitely not for a cost that fell within a graduate researcher’s budget. It didn’t make sense.” Eventually, Broockman’s curiosity would lead to LaCour’s
downfall. In May 2015, he and fellow graduate student Joshua Kalla, as well as Yale professor Peter Aronow, posted a docu- ment entitled “Irregularities in LaCour (2014).” They argued that “the survey data in the study showed multiple statistical irregularities and was likely ‘not collected as described,’ ” The New Yorker said. Not long aſter, Science retracted the paper from its website. It wasn’t clear if the paper was a deliberate fraud or wishful
thinking. The New Yorker posited that confirmation bias — the people involved in the study wanted to believe the findings — could have played a role in the paper’s positive reception from onset to publication. “We know that studies confirming liberal thinking sometimes get a pass where ones challenging those ideas might get killed in review,” the magazine said. “The same effect may have made journalists more excited about covering the results.” No matter the motivation, the discredited paper was a black
eye for Science and for the media outlets that lapped it up. It was not, however, an isolated occurrence. Science fraud is, in fact, more common than most people likely suspect. In November 2015, the website Quartz noted that “the number of published science papers that have been retracted due to misconduct or fraud has ballooned in the last decade.” A month later, The Scientist echoed that conclusion. “Recent years have seen a spate of scientific scandals,” it said. “Whether
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