They call it deep canvassing. (Location 428) #✂️

In their book Get Out the Vote!, political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber examined more than one hundred published papers detailing attempts to influence voters’ opinions with mailouts, canvassing, phone calls, and television ads. Green and Gerber concluded it was highly unlikely any of them made any impact. (Location 780) #✂️ #blue

What did they find? In short, it worked. When it was all said and done, the overall shift Broockman and Kalla measured in Miami was greater than “the opinion change that occurred from 1998 to 2012 towards gay men and lesbians in the United States.” In one conversation, one in ten people opposed to transgender rights changed their views, and on average, they changed that view by 10 points on a 101-point “feelings thermometer,” as they called it, catching up to and surpassing the shift that had taken place in the general public over the last fourteen years. (Location 835) #✂️ #blue

Kalla told me the most exciting aspect of their research was that the effect seemed permanent. They continue to track the households, and so far the people who changed their minds show no signs of backtracking into their former attitudes, something almost unheard of in political science research. Their paper was published in Science in 2016, and the headlines said it all: “No, Wait, Short Conversations Really Can Reduce Prejudice,” wrote The Atlantic. “How Do You Change Voters’ Minds? Have a Conversation,” wrote The New York Times. (Location 853) #✂️ #blue

Once again, deep canvassing made headlines across the country. Covering the first time it had been used in a presidential election, Rolling Stone reported, “In other words, for every 100 completed phone calls, three votes were added to Biden’s vote margin after they received a deep canvassing call.” Altogether, Broockman and Kalla found that deep canvassing was 102 times more effective than traditional canvassing, television, radio, direct mail, and phone banking combined. (Location 868) #✂️ #blue

When I asked Broockman and Kalla for a lead or two, they said to look deeper into something psychologists call elaboration, a state of active learning in which a person unpacks a new idea by relating to something they already understand. For example, on first viewing, you might describe Alien as “Jaws in space,” but, if you saw Alien first, you might describe Jaws as “Alien in the ocean.” Most of the time, when on autopilot or performing routine tasks, we see the world as we expect to see it, and most of the time that’s fine; but the brain often gets things wrong because it prefers to sacrifice accuracy for speed. When we stop ourselves from going with our first instincts, or our “guts,” when we are thinking about our own thinking, we become more open to elaborating, to adding something new to ourselves by reaching a deeper understanding of something we thought we already understood quite well. In short, deep canvassing likely encourages elaboration by offering people an opportunity to stop and think. (Location 908) #✂️