Conventional wisdom is that we’re polarized. Observers of American politics – from reporters to academics – argue that Americans on the left and the right are so entrenched in their beliefs that attempts at persuasion are nearly pointless.  But a study in Science this month demonstrates exactly the opposite. The study showed that listening to sincere appeals from a person on one side of an issue can change the opinions of people on the other side — even on an issue as personal as same-sex marriage. What’s more, the shifts in opinion can last and spread. Polarized or not, durable persuasion is possible.  How does a gay person persuade people who probably voted against legalizing same-sex marriage to change their positions? Through a conversation that starts like this: “What do you value most about your marriage?” “How has your marriage impacted your life?”  These are two of the questions in a canvassing program pioneered by the Vote for Equality team at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. But the questions weren’t posed in a survey; they were part of a larger, engaged conversation with straight and gay canvassers that took place on roughly 1,000 front porches around Los Angeles during the summer of 2013. The impact of these conversations, which lasted on average roughly 22 minutes, was assessed by two political scientists.  The results of this study by the researchers, Don Green of Columbia University and Michael LaCour of the University of California, Los Angeles, show that these active conversations about marriage, especially with a gay person, affected people’s attitudes toward same-sex marriage in significant ways, moving people, on average, from the views held by the average resident of Nebraska or Ohio, states with constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, to views more commonly held by residents of Massachusetts — the first state to legalize same-sex marriage.  The conclusion? Sharing, listening and showing vulnerability can change beliefs about public policy.  That listening and sharing move people may not be news to leadership gurus, therapists or executive coaches, but it isn’t typically how politicians think about affecting mass opinion, especially in an era of intense division on most issues. People are mostly wedded to their beliefs on such things — or are at least wedded to their party’s beliefs, which they take to be their own. Politicians understand this. Public opinion, when it moves at all, moves slowly.  This is one of the reasons it has been challenging for scientists to find evidence of persuasive effects of the type that Mr. LaCour and Mr. Green uncover in this work. Why have these researchers succeeded where nearly a thousand others have failed? Two reasons: an unusually engaging effort to persuade people and an unprecedented research design to track changes in attitudes.  The unusual persuasive appeal was the brainchild of Dave Fleischer, head of the Vote for Equality team. Mr. Fleischer produced a script that not only involved people in discussions about their own marriages or the marriage of their friends, but also included the unexpectedly powerful moment of having a gay stranger come out to people on their front porch. The Fleischer interactions are serious conversations about intricate topics.  Mr. Fleischer wanted to study the effectiveness of his scripts, so he asked Mr. LaCour and Mr. Green for help; the research design was their idea. (Disclosure: I have collaborated with Mr. Green on other work and am the chairwoman of Mr. LaCour’s dissertation committee.) Most field experiments about politics randomly assign people to receive treatments and assess their effectiveness by using public information like voter registration or turnout records. This field experiment on Mr. Fleischer’s actively engaged conversation is different from nearly all the others that came before it in four ways.  First, Mr. LaCour and Mr. Green needed a way to track people’s attitudes, which meant they needed a survey. But the survey had to be ostensibly disconnected from the canvassing, or the subjects would be on to the test rather quickly. Mr. LaCour had the idea of impaneling people in Mr. Fleischer’s neighborhoods into a long-term survey about life in America. He also had the idea of targeting households with more than one registered voter so they could test the spillover effects of the treatment to other people in the house. Additionally, he raised enough money to keep the panel going for more than a year, which enabled tracking of people’s attitudes about same-sex marriage long after Mr. Fleischer’s team had come and gone.  There was one more innovation: In order to isolate the effects of witnessing a gay person coming out (the thing Mr. Fleischer believed would be the driving force in the method), Mr. LaCour proposed that some houses in the treatment group be visited by a gay canvasser and others by a straight one. (He randomly assigned which houses got which.) During the part of the script where gay canvassers came out as gay, the straight canvassers revealed a personal connection to a gay person: a son, daughter, brother, sister or friend.  The results were so striking that Mr. LaCour and Mr. Green immediately replicated them in full with additional canvassing, to verify the results were real and not obtained by chance.  When canvassers had emotional conversations with straight people who lived in neighborhoods that supported bans on same-sex marriage, they changed people’s minds — not only about same-sex marriage, but also about gays and lesbians as a group. However, these changes did not last as long for those who were canvassed by a straight person. Nor did they spread through the house to others. The changes in views induced by gay canvassers, however, lasted as long as the survey was in the field — nearly an entire year — and they influenced other people in the household, too.  Mr. Fleischer, Mr. LaCour, and Mr. Green have managed to demonstrate through research that connecting with another human being by sharing, listening, and showing vulnerabilities can lead to compromise. As we head in to the new year, with an increasingly divided government, they’ve also given politicians something to think about.  Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at U.C.L.A., is a co-author of “The Gamble,” about the 2012 presidential campaign. Follow her on Twitter at @vavreck.  The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.
Sincere personal appeals can create lasting change on an issue in opponents’ minds, at least in some circumstances.