A researcher apparently made up the results of the much-publicized study, as revealed Tuesday by scientists trying to replicate it. The researcher also credited funding organizations that deny having any involvement in the work.
Mathew Sumner / Associated Press / Via apimages.com
A study claiming that gay people advocating same-sex marriage can change voters' minds has been retracted due to fraud.
What's more, the funding agencies credited with supporting the study deny having any involvement.
The study was published last December in Science, and received lots of media attention (including from BuzzFeed News). 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 senior author on the study, retracted it on Tuesday shortly after learning that his co-author, UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour, had faked the results. Science posted an official "editorial expression of concern" — a very big deal in the science world — on Wednesday afternoon.
"I am deeply embarrassed by this turn of events and apologize to the editors, reviewers, and readers of Science," Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University, said in his retraction letter to the journal, as posted on the Retraction Watch blog.
This American Life, the hugely popular radio program that featured this study in an episode in April, interviewed Green on Wednesday about the problems with the study.
"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 told the show's host, Ira Glass. Green also told Glass that LaCour is still claiming the data is real.
When asked for comment from BuzzFeed News LaCour responded with the same message that he tweeted on Wednesday: