This week, the journal Science published a remarkable bit of insight: It’s possible to reduce prejudice with one 10-minute conversation. The study, by two political scientists, shows how voters can not only become more accepting of transgender people after conversations with people canvassing on their behalf, but can also become more willing to vote for transgender rights ballot measures.
Watch: this is a scientifically proven method to reduce anti-transgender prejudice
Screen Capture, via YouTube
Brian Resnick was Vox’s science and health editor and is the co-creator of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about unanswered questions in science.
What’s more, the researchers found that the change of heart can last at least three months and is resistant to anti-transgender attack ads.
David Broockman, a professor at Stanford, and Josh Kalla, a grad student at the University of California Berkeley, ran the test, which is the first real-world experiment on whether prejudice reduction is possible (for any marginalized group).
What’s important to know about this experiment is that Broockman and Kalla weren’t studying an ordinary canvassing conversation (the type where a stranger spews facts and figures in your face). Instead, they were assessing a technique known as “deep canvassing.” The key to this technique is to get the voter to do most of the talking.
Here’s a video example of deep canvassing. It’s of a real voter and a canvasser from the Leadership LAB, a program of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, in March. The woman in the video starts off ambivalent on transgender issues. But through deep canvassing, the activist is able to turn her around.
This technique works because it gets voters to recall their life experiences, says Dave Fleischer, who created deep canvassing at the Leadership LAB in the wake of Proposition 8, a ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in California.
Instead of pelting voters with facts, “we ask open-ended questions and then we listen,” Fleischer says. “And then we continue to ask open-ended questions based on what they just told us.”
Specifically, the canvasser asks the voter to recall a time when he or she was discriminated against. And then toward the end of the conversation, the canvasser nudges the voter into thinking about how that experience can relate to the plight of transgender people. The idea is that people learn lessons more durably when they come to the conclusions on their own.
In the video above, notice how the voter starts to come around on the issue when the canvasser asks if she’s ever been on the receiving end of discrimination. She talks about being picked on at work and feeling different. He responds by telling his own story of being discriminated against for being gay. It’s a real heart to heart between strangers.
And in that moment he points out that a transgender nondiscrimination law would help people who feel discriminated against at school or work.
“Oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense,” she says.
The video ends like this. “I would totally vote in favor,” she says of a transgender protection law. “It’s only right. Let a person be who they are.”
