Carefully trained volunteers from the Florida LGBT advocacy organization, SAVE, went door to door to talk about prejudice and transgender discrimination and found that a 10 to 20 minute conversation could have positive effects lasting at least 3 months.
A new study published in the journal Science on Thursday reveals that a single 10-minute conversation can reduce anti-transgender prejudice, with the effects of that conversation lasting for at least 3 months. For their research, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla had 56 canvassers go door-to-door to talk with South Florida voters about their transphobic feelings and found that the conversations greatly reduced transphobia. The decreases were greater than the average decrease in Americans’ homophobia from 1998 to 2012.
Broockman, a Stanford University professor, and Kalla, from the University of California Berkely, began their study with a questionnaire asking about the voter’s feelings about transgender people, and whether they would support legal protection against discrimination against transgender people. Volunteers from the Florida LGBT advocacy organization, SAVE, then visited half of the 501 survey respondents and asked them about recycling. The other half of the respondents were asked to watch a short video about transgender people, and listen to information both for and against discrimination protections. The subjects were then asked to share stories of times they had faced prejudice.
Three months after the canvass, the study participants were sent the original survey again, which included the question of how positively or negatively they felt about transgender people based on a scale of 0 to 100. Those who had discussed prejudice with the study canvassers felt, on average, about 10 points more positively toward transgender people.
Director of Research and Public Education at Human Rights Campaign, Jay Brown, said, “The researchers are proving in a very specific way something we’ve always known broadly – that increased visibility of transgender people can spark a dialogue critical to our long-term success. Whether we’re going door-to-door or we’re looking to impact millions of voters, we need to find creative approaches to engaging in public education with real stories of transgender people and our lives.
Broockman said the study results should not be considered an easy fix for transgender discrimination. The canvassers were specifically trained for the task, which he says took a long time to develop. However, he was optimistic that a similar approach might be applied to change other beliefs, such as race relations or climate change.
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