Sometimes, When Something Is Too Good to be True, It Is

What would have been a remarkable social science finding turns out to have been based on fraud:

A study claiming that gay people advocating for same-sex marriage can change voters’ minds has been retracted due to fraud.

The study was published last December in Science, and received lots of media attention. It found that a 20-minute, one-on-one conversation with a gay political canvasser could steer voters in favor of same-sex marriage. Not only that, but these changed opinions lasted for at least a year and influenced other people in the voter’s household, the study found.

Donald Green, the lead author on the study, retracted it on Tuesday shortly after learning that his co-author, UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour, had faked the results.

I strongly recommend Kieran Healy’s piece on the subject. In particular, I’d like to emphasize this:

When something like this happens it raises many issues internal to academia, from the relative role of the authors involved, to the importance of available and replicable data, to the often unrecognized importance of simple honesty in science. As a social scientist I worry most about the quality the frauds we don’t spot. Science is often bitterly competitive but it depends on honesty. It is not set up to weed out liars. We simply can’t proceed without a vocational norm of honesty. Imagine what research, or talks, or conferences would be like if you had to routinely question not simply the quality or competence but the actual honesty of speakers. The same goes for supervision. Or consider having to check not just the quality of grad student work, but whether they were lying to you about the data. Much of what we do would become simply impossible.

…Jesse Singal interviews Donald Green.