Building Lasting Support For a Controversial Social Issue: "You forget the message, but you remember the messenger"

Conventional wisdom holds that changing the views of voters on divisive issues is difficult if not impossible — and that when change does occur, it is almost always temporary. Donald Green

But Michael LaCour, a UCLA doctoral candidate in political science, and Donald Green, a Columbia University political science professor, have demonstrated that a single conversation can go a long way toward building lasting support for a controversial social issue. In addition — nearly as surprisingly — the effect tends to spill over to friends and family members.

Donald Green, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University

The key is putting voters in direct contact with individuals who are directly affected by the issue. The findings are reported in a study that will be published Dec. 12 in the journal Science.

"You forget the message, but you remember the messenger," said LaCour, the study's lead author, who also is a researcher at UCLA's California Center for Population Research.

The issue LaCour and Green were studying was Americans' support for gay marriage, but LaCour is in the process of replicating the results with another hot-button issue, abortion rights. He hopes to eventually test whether a similar approach could shift people's attitudes toward undocumented immigrants.

The project unfolded in 2013, during the month leading up to a US Supreme Court decision that effectively overturned California's Proposition 8, which had outlawed same-sex marriage in 2008. The study evaluated a long-standing door-to-door campaign in support of gay marriage by the nonprofit Los Angeles LGBT Center.

LaCour and Green began by identifying California precincts that had supported the ban on gay marriage, eventually settling on an especially conservative area of Southern California. They then used voter rolls to invite every voter in those precincts, as well as their housemates, to participate in an Internet survey on politics, including only two questions about support for same-sex marriage. (Involving housemates in the study would later allow the researchers to measure whether changes in voters’ attitudes ultimately influence those in their social networks.) Eventually, researchers would survey the same 9,500 voters four times over the course of a year. Michael LaCour

Participants were randomly divided into three groups. One received house calls from specially trained LGBT Center canvassers who advocated gay marriage. Half of the canvassers were gay; the other half were straight.

A second group received visits from the same canvassers, but the canvassers discussed the benefits of recycling — not the topic of gay marriage. In these visits, the canvassers did not reveal whether they were gay or straight.

Michael LaCour, Political Science Doctoral Candidate; Christopher Sowers

The third set was not visited by canvassers.

The gay marriage canvassers asked voters what they enjoyed about being married (if the subjects were married) or the benefits they'd witnessed in the lives of married friends and relatives (if they weren't). Gay canvassers then revealed their own sexual orientation and explained that they longed for the same benefits the interviewees had described, and straight canvassers discussed how they hoped a close relative who was gay could enjoy the benefits of marriage.

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Building Lasting Support For a Controversial Social Issue: "You forget the message, but you remember the messenger"

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