Deep canvassing

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Deep canvassing is a structured interview that uses long empathic conversations with the intention of shifting participant's beliefs. Though deep canvassing emerged from traditional political canvassing, it has been shown to be an effective way to change political beliefs, having been used by researchers and activists for decades to garner support for political and/or social ideologies. Deep canvassing has been used for years to gain traction for issues surrounding the LGBTQ+ community, animal rights, and racial justice. [1]

Contents

History

The idea originated in 2012, at the Los Angeles LGBT Center when staffers decided to talk to people who voted against same sex marriage to understand them better. [2] [1] After the tactic was used in a pro-marriage-equality campaign in Minnesota, Steve Deline, Ella Barrett, and David Fleischer enlisted professors David Broockman and Josh Kalla to study the efficacy of the tactic. [2]

Deep canvassing was used by People's Action in the 2020 United States presidential election because of its efficacy in persuasion, democracy, and ethics. [1] Prior to the election, deep canvassing was promoted as an inclusive, value-based, communication strategy that works as a strong means of political persuasion [3] —this is because of its ability to extend a path into advocation for change through like-minded social groups, its ability to position voters as a central facet of community organizing, and its effectiveness. [2] [4]

Effectiveness

In 2014, a paper by Michael J. LaCour, When contact changes minds, was released showing that longer and 'deeper' conversation can change minds [5] but was retracted the following year for having falsified data. [5] [6]

Kalla and Broockman's study, published in 2016, found that ten minute conversations did have an impact on residents’ views of transgender issues. [7]

In 2017, Kalla and Broockman published another study that found brief door-to-door canvassing, had nearly zero effect on voting choices. [8] [9] Of their six studies, Kalla and Brookman have found that deep canvassing does have measurable effects. [2]

Deep canvassing has been shown to be effective in person and over the phone. [10] [11]

In 2017, Changing the Conversation Together was launched as an organization of concerned citizens building a national corps of deep canvassers. This volunteer based and professionally-led organization helped flip Staten Island in 2018 [12] and Pennsylvania in 2020. [13] [14]

Process

The process of deep canvassing can be understood like a layer cake. It typically begins by building rapport with participants, then, the canvasser tells a story of significance to the topic at hand, and lastly the participant's experiences are explored. [15]

Brennan and Jackson studied the dialogical process of deep canvassing. They worked with Showing Up for Racial Justice New York City (SUFRJNYC) and studied the organization's facilitation of a deep canvassing conversation about reparations for Black Americans. [4] The canvassing conversation was semi-structured and followed the initial script given to the canvassers. Participants were first asked to rate their initial attitudes about reparations on a numerical scale of 1–10. [4] The conversations with participants included asking about their life experiences and that informed their current beliefs. The canvassers were encouraged to actively listen to the participants, tell personal stories, and avoid using facts in their conversations. [4]

There was also found to be four process themes of deep canvassing when performing data analysis of canvassing conversations; these themes were Interpersonal agreement, Intervoice dynamics, Authoring the self and the other, and Personal experience. [4]

While not confirmed by the study due to its exploratory nature, Brennan and Jackson [4] found evidence that cognitive dissonance and perspective-taking were important concepts that may play a role in deep canvassing.  

Neighbours United has a playbook and toolkit with some information on how deep canvassing is performed. Their website also includes a deep canvassing script on climate change that is available for downloading and viewing.  

See also

Related Research Articles

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Persuasion or persuasion arts is an umbrella term for influence. Persuasion can influence a person's beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, or behaviours.

Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is insuperable for most people, but they can manage it, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills.

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as the mental discomfort people feel when their beliefs and actions are inconsistent and contradictory, ultimately encouraging some change to align better and reduce this dissonance. Relevant items of information include peoples' actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when an action or idea is psychologically inconsistent with the other, people do all in their power to change either so that they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.

The Hawthorne effect is a type of human behavior reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed. The effect was discovered in the context of research conducted at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant; however, some scholars think the descriptions are fictitious.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Political campaign</span> Attempt to influence the decision making process within a specific group

A political campaign is an organized effort which seeks to influence the decision making progress within a specific group. In democracies, political campaigns often refer to electoral campaigns, by which representatives are chosen or referendums are decided. In modern politics, the most high-profile political campaigns are focused on general elections and candidates for head of state or head of government, often a president or prime minister.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canvassing</span> Systematic initiation of direct contact with individuals

Canvassing, also known as door knocking or phone banking, is the systematic initiation of direct contact with individuals, commonly used during political campaigns. Canvassing can be done for many reasons: political campaigning, grassroots fundraising, community awareness, membership drives, and more. Campaigners knock on doors to contact people personally. Canvassing is used by political parties and issue groups to identify supporters, persuade the undecided, and add voters to the voters list through voter registration, and it is central to get out the vote operations. It is the core element of what political campaigns call the ground game or field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Get out the vote</span> Efforts aimed at increasing the voter turnout in elections

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Field experiment</span> Experiment conducted outside the laboratory

Field experiments are experiments carried out outside of laboratory settings.

Experimental philosophy is an emerging field of philosophical inquiry that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions. This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called "armchair" philosophy, by experimental philosophers. Experimental philosophy initially began by focusing on philosophical questions related to intentional action, the putative conflict between free will and determinism, and causal vs. descriptive theories of linguistic reference. However, experimental philosophy has continued to expand to new areas of research.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social experiment</span> Psychological or sociological research

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"When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality" is a fraudulent article by then-UCLA political science graduate student Michael LaCour and Columbia University political science professor Donald Green. The article was published in the academic journal Science in December 2014, and retracted in May 2015 after it emerged that the data in the study had been forged by LaCour. The article purported to demonstrate that people's minds on the issue of gay marriage could be changed by conversations with gay canvassers, but not with straight canvassers.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Issenburg, Sasha (October 13, 2014). "Changing Minds, One Knock at a Time". Bloomburg Businessweek. 1: 2. ISSN   0007-7135 – via Business Source Complete.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Kroll, Andy (2020-07-15). "Can Millions of Deep Conversations With Total Strangers Beat Trump -- and Heal America?". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2021-03-29.
  3. ↑ Demetrious, Kristin (2022). "Deep canvassing: Persuasion, ethics, democracy and activist public relations". Public Relations Inquiry. 11 (3): 361–377. doi:10.1177/2046147X211033838. S2CID   238801205 – via SagePUB.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Brennan, William; Jackson, Margo A. (Feb 2022). "A Qualitative Examination of Dialogical Elements in Anti-Racist Deep Canvassing Conversations". The Counseling Psychologist . 50 (2). Sage Publications: 35. doi:10.1177/00110000211055408. ISSN   1552-3861. S2CID   245622614 – via APA PsycInfo.
  5. 1 2 LaCour, Michael J.; Green, Donald P. (2014-12-12). "When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality". Science. 346 (6215): 1366–1369. Bibcode:2014Sci...346.1366L. doi:10.1126/science.1256151. ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   25504721. S2CID   6322609.
  6. ↑ Resnick, Brian (2016-04-07). "These scientists can prove it's possible to reduce prejudice". Vox. Retrieved 2021-03-29.
  7. ↑ Broockman, David; Kalla, Joshua (2016-04-08). "Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing". Science. 352 (6282): 220–224. Bibcode:2016Sci...352..220B. doi: 10.1126/science.aad9713 . ISSN   0036-8075. PMID   27124458.
  8. ↑ Kalla, Joshua; Broockman, David E. (2017-09-25). "The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments". Rochester, NY. SSRN   3042867.
  9. ↑ Matthews, Dylan (2017-09-28). "A massive new study reviews the evidence on whether campaigning works. The answer's bleak". Vox. Retrieved 2021-03-29.
  10. ↑ Resnick, Brian (2020-01-29). "How to talk someone out of bigotry". Vox. Retrieved 2021-03-29.
  11. ↑ Kalla, Joshua L.; Broockman, David E. (May 2020). "Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence from Three Field Experiments". American Political Science Review. 114 (2): 410–425. doi:10.1017/S0003055419000923. ISSN   0003-0554. S2CID   213591421.
  12. ↑ "NowThisNews".
  13. ↑ Massing, Michael (2020-02-04). "Opinion | To Sway Swing Voters, Try Empathy". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-04-26.
  14. ↑ "The American Prospect Ideas, Politics & Power". NowThis News. 24 February 2020. Retrieved 2022-04-26.
  15. ↑ Brock-Petroshius, Kristen (March 2022). "Organizing Through Stories: The Role of Emotions in Increasing Support for Decarceration". Journal of Community Practice . 30 (1): 84–104. doi:10.1080/10705422.2022.2033376. ISSN   1070-5422. S2CID   246520541 – via SociINDEX.
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