BECAUSE “SOCIAL” SCIENCE IS OXYMORONIC: Scientific Fraud and Politics:
Last year UCLA political science grad student and maybe soon-to-be Princeton professorMichael LaCour released stunning findings from a field trial on gay marriage called “When Contact Changes Minds.” He found that a 20-minute conservation with a house-to-house canvasser could convert huge numbers of opponents into supporters, at least if the canvassers explained they were gay and told personal stories.
The study quickly became a media sensation, the most talked-about poli-sci paper in years, and it led gay-rights activists including some working on the Ireland referendum to retool their voter outreach.
The problem is that Mr. LaCour stands accused of faking everything from start to finish. Ph.D. candidates at Berkeley David Broockman andJosh Kalla tried but failed to replicate Mr. LaCour’s results. They then noticed unusual statistical irregularities in Mr. LaCour’s survey panel. He now says he pulled a Hillary Clintonand deleted his raw data. But the canvassing firm he claimed to have employed has never heard of the project—and there is no proof anyone was ever contacted, much less changed their minds. . . .
The larger question is why anyone invested Mr. LaCour’s paper with the authority of “science.” Experience and common sense suggest that persuading people to reconsider their opinions is difficult. An uninvited nag carrying on about politics on the front porch sounds like one of the less successful approaches.
Then again, the study flattered the ideological sensibilities of liberals, who tend to believe that resistance to gay marriage can only be the artifact of ignorance or prejudice, not moral or religious conviction. Mr. LaCour’s purported findings let them claim that science had proved them right.
Similar bias contaminates inquiries across the social sciences, which often seem to exist so liberals can claim that “studies show” some political assertion to be empirical. Thus they can recast stubborn political debates about philosophy and values as disputes over facts that can be resolved by science. President Obama is a particular aficionado of this bait and switch.
Calling social science a “science” is, frankly, laughable. And these days, even the “hard” sciences have become so politicized that one often cannot trust the “peer review” process to weed out errors, as is so often the case with global warming climate change data.