Durably Reducing Transphobia (Deep Canvassing)

The exception that defines the rule: the one form of communication with rigorously demonstrated, durable effects on deep attitudes. Roughly ten-minute doorstep conversations in Miami — non-judgmental, built on the canvasser eliciting the voter’s own experiences and actively taking perspectives — measurably reduced prejudice against transgender people, with effects still present three months later and robust to attack ads. Kalla & Broockman’s later field experiments (American Political Science Review, 2020) replicated the approach on attitudes toward unauthorised immigrants. (The 2016 study is also the famous replacement for a retracted predecessor, which is partly why its methods are unusually careful.) Why it matters here: deep canvassing is Told-zone work that moves beliefs — but its active ingredients are dialogic encounter, personal narrative and perspective-taking, not message transmission. It is communication behaving like relationship. Our storm research holds it as “the proof that the belief-moving form of Told is dialogic” — which supports the Canvas’s conditions argument from inside the communications evidence, rather than against it. [source_status: headline claims solid and the Science URL verified; check specific effect sizes against the paper before quoting numbers] ↗ Go to the original source