Of the many problems in the world today, one of the most pernicious is people’s inability to get along with others whom they see as different from themselves. Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, and Kurds can’t get along in the Middle East; Irish Catholics don’t mix with Irish Protestants; Serbs fight Croats; and in central China, the Han majority clash with the Muslim Hui minority. Then there is the color of our skin, the dividing line that has haunted America at least since the first European settlers reached our shores and treated Native Americans as curiosities or subhumans to be eradicated. The enslavement of Africans soon followed. The onset of slavery can be traced to a fateful August day in 1619, when English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, purchased “20 and Odd” Africans from Dutch traders in return for food and supplies. Slavery was not formally recognized in Virginia until 1662, but the evil, corrupting practice of human beings owning human beings had gained a foothold in the New World.1
As recently as sixty years ago, many states denied basic freedoms to African Americans, limiting whom they could marry, where they could live, and where they could send their children to school. Today, such laws are a thing of the past, reflecting a broad change in attitudes in America. For example, in 1958, only 37 percent of white Americans said that they were willing to vote for a well-qualified black presidential candidate, whereas in 1997, 93 percent said they were willing to do so. In 2008, of course, this became a reality when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States.
Nonetheless, the color of our skin still matters. Consider what happened in Jena, Louisiana, in August of 2006. No one wants to stand under the hot glaring summer sun for too long in this small southern town. This was a problem at the local high school, because there was only one shade tree where students could escape the sun during recess, and by tradition it was reserved for whites only. That’s the way it had always been, at least until Kenneth Purvis, an African American student, got tired of sitting in the sun and asked the principal if he might be allowed to rest beneath the tree. (The fact that he had to ask is telling.) The principal told Purvis that he could sit wherever he liked, but not everyone reacted kindly to Purvis’s request. When students arrived at school the next morning, they were greeted by three nooses dangling from the oak tree, starkly evocative of the countless lynchings of African Americans in the not-so-distant Southern past. After a good deal of controversy over this incident, including a fight where six African American students were arrested for severely beating a white student, the town leaders decided that the best solution was to cut down the tree.
Such blatant racism is not limited to the deep South, as illustrated by what happened at a swim club in suburban Philadelphia in the summer of 2009. A city day camp contracted with the club to use its pool on Mondays, because budget cuts had shut down the public pool they had been using. But when the sixty-five black and Hispanic kids got off the bus and walked into the club, towels in hand, most of the white kids got out of the pool. The white kids’ parents “were standing there with their arms crossed,” said Alethea Wright, the director of the day camp. “I was hearing comments like, ‘They won’t be back here.’ ” One of the campers, nine-year-old Kevina Day, heard a white mother complain about the influx of campers. “She was saying a lot of racist words,” Kevina reported. “The lady who said the bad things is a grown woman. We’re just kids.” A few days later, the director of the pool refunded the day camp’s money and told them not to come back. “There is a lot of concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion… and the atmosphere of the pool,” he said. Three hundred and eighty-seven years after the Jamestown settlers purchased the first slaves in America, race continues to divide Americans.2
Lest you think these are isolated instances of discrimination, consider studies that the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development has conducted since the 1970s on housing bias. Trained testers visit real-estate agencies to inquire about renting or buying houses and apartments that had been randomly selected from newspaper ads. The testers present nearly identical credentials—similar incomes, debt levels, educational backgrounds, employment status, and family circumstances. The only way they differ is in their race or ethnicity—some are white, some are black, and some are Hispanic. Even in the most recent testing, in the year 2000, a sizable percentage of the blacks and Hispanics were treated more negatively than whites. When inquiring about rental units, for example, whites were favored over blacks 22 percent of the time and over Hispanics 26 percent of the time.3
It is thus imperative to find ways to bridge the racial divide, and to do so, business leaders, educators, and psychologists have developed all sorts of interventions and workshops, like the Theatre at Work program discussed in chapter 2. Do they work? The answer is by now familiar: many well-known interventions either have not been adequately tested or have been shown to be ineffective, whereas techniques developed by social psychologists, using the story-editing approach, show great promise.
Let’s begin by considering a well-known intervention that was implemented at a small liberal arts college a few years ago. An attractive student with striking blue eyes, whom I will call Lauren, showed up bright and early at a campus building for a group exercise on intergroup relations. At the beginning of the meeting, the group leader, a middle-aged woman, noticed that Lauren did not have a notebook or pencil to take notes and spent several minutes belittling her for her forgetfulness. Here is what happened next:
LEADER: You’re acting angry.
LAUREN: I am angry.
LEADER: What are you angry about?
LAUREN: I’m angry that you are yelling at me.
LEADER: [Turning to the other students] Do you hear me yelling? [Turning back to Lauren] THIS IS YELLING! Have I done that yet?
LAUREN: Okay, you’re using a stern voice.
LEADER: Are you… are you defining ME?
LAUREN: No I am not defining you.
LEADER: [To the other students] Is she defining me? Did she say I am yelling when I am not? Perception is everything. [To Lauren] Do you feel like I’m yelling at you?
LAUREN: Yes.
LEADER: Yes—why?
LAUREN: Because you are using a stern voice.
LEADER: A stern voi… Honey, it isn’t my fault you are stupid.
LAUREN: Would you like me to go get my paper and pencil?
LEADER: I wouldn’t like you in any way, shape, or form.
LAUREN: Okay then, that’s fine.
LEADER: Let’s get that understood here.
LEADER: It isn’t a matter of whether I like you or not.
The group leader then asked Lauren to repeat an increasingly long string of phrases until she stumbled and failed. The leader harangued her again about not having her pencil and paper.
LEADER: Did you learn anything?
LAUREN: [Barely audible] Yes.
LEADER: Do you appreciate what you just learned?
LAUREN: [Barely audible] Yes.
LEADER: Did you like the way it was taught?
LAUREN: [Lips trembling] No.
LEADER: Nooo—any of the rest of you ever taught in that fashion?
SCATTERED VOICES: Yes.
LEADER: Yes. And did you have to express appreciation for it? Yeah… [Lauren is openly crying at this point.] Did you learn something from her example? [To Lauren] What are you crying about?… What are you crying about?
LAUREN: My feelings were hurt.
LEADER: How were your feelings hurt?
LAUREN: [Inaudible]
LEADER: Should I feel sorry for her?
LAUREN: [Crying openly] I don’t expect you to.
LEADER: [To other students] Should I feel sorry for her? Some of you are thinking that this is too harsh for this young woman.
Although this might seem like a clear case of abuse on the part of the leader, in fact it was an exercise designed to raise awareness about prejudice and racism. The group leader, a woman named Jane Elliott, was conducting a workshop she developed to get people to experience firsthand what it feels like to be the victim of prejudice. The students had arrived at a campus building at 8:00 a.m. and were divided into two groups on the basis of the color of their eyes. Those with blue eyes (like Lauren) were asked to put a green felt collar around their necks and wait in a bare room with an insufficient number of chairs. Those with brown eyes waited in a different room, where there were refreshments and plenty of places to sit. Elliott told the brown-eyed students that for the next two hours they would be the privileged, powerful group that was superior to blue-eyed people. The blue-eyed students, she informed them, would be treated as inferior, unintelligent people who had no rights.
The blue-eyed students were then ushered into the room and instructed to sit in the middle, surrounded by the brown-eyed students. Some had to sit on the floor because there were not enough chairs. The exercise began with Elliott declaring, “I’m your resident bitch for today and make no mistake about it, that’s exactly what this is about.” For the next two hours, she belittled, insulted, and humiliated Lauren and the other blue-eyed students.
Elliott developed her exercise many years earlier, while teaching in an elementary school in a rural Iowa town. The day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, she was determined to teach her all-white students about prejudice and came up with the idea of dividing them on the basis of the color of their eyes, designating one group as inferior to the other. In 1970, ABC News produced a documentary film on Elliott’s technique called The Eye of the Storm, and Elliott eventually left her teaching job to become a full-time diversity trainer. The exercise with college students, described above, was captured in a 2001 documentary film entitled The Angry Eye.4
Elliott is a determined woman who has dedicated her life to reducing prejudice and racism. “I’m trying to give the people who participate in this exercise the opportunity to find out how it feels to be something other than white in this society,” she says in the 2001 documentary. And Elliot is convinced that it works. “I think the exercise does indeed make [the participants] more aware and I think it does indeed… allow them to have more empathy. I know it does. I think it changes the way they think about themselves and their environment. I think it changes the way they perceive others. I think it changes the way they perceive their own power.” But is she right?5
Diversity training evolved in response to a variety of pressures, including the influx of women and minorities into the workforce, the internationalization of business, the integration of college campuses, and affirmative-action policies in the workplace. Dozens of nonprofit and for-profit organizations have developed training programs for businesses, schools, and other organizations that include written materials, videos, skits (like those performed by Theatre at Work), and role-playing, adding up to a $10-billion-per-year industry. Approximately 65 percent of organizations in the United States and 60 percent of organizations in the United Kingdom offer diversity training. Some focus on improving productivity in businesses that, increasingly, have multicultural workforces; some target discriminatory behavior in the workplace; others attempt to increase the hiring and promotion of women and minorities. But all such programs, directly or indirectly, are concerned with reducing prejudice and discrimination. At this point, it will probably come as little surprise that very few of these programs have been adequately tested.6
A few years ago, for example, administrators at the university where I teach decided that all incoming students should undergo some form of diversity training. One idea under consideration was to ask students to complete a Web-based exercise that would increase their sensitivity toward members of other groups and enlighten them about the diversity of the university community they were about to join. Who should develop the exercise? The administrators sought proposals from businesses that have sprung up to provide diversity training and invited a few finalists to make presentations about the exercises they would offer. I was able to attend a couple of these presentations and came away discouraged. Although well-meaning, the staffs of these companies appeared to know little about the literature on diversity and prejudice, and their programs were based more on common sense than on well-grounded research.
Even worse, neither they nor the university administrators planned to test how effective the Web exercise would be, other than to ask participants a few questions about their impressions of it. As I discuss in chapter 2, such questions are no substitute for an experimental design in which people are randomly assigned to a group that gets the intervention or to a control group that does not. It did not occur to the administrators, however, to ask the diversity-training companies, “How will we know if your intervention works?”
In their defense, none of the administrators was a social scientist who could be expected to know how to test interventions. And once some faculty members in the psychology department explained to the administrators the importance of testing interventions experimentally, they got it. (Because of other pressures, the diversity exercise was never implemented, but that’s another story.)
My point is that we have no idea whether most diversity-training programs are having the intended beneficial effects, are a colossal waste of time, or, worse, are doing harm. This state of affairs is not limited to diversity-training programs in organizational settings like business and universities. In 1997, President Clinton formed the President’s Initiative on Race, which, among other things, reviewed many of the programs in the United States that had been developed to promote racial reconciliation. In 1999, the commission published a report that identified 124 of the most promising programs, including religion-based initiatives, governmental interventions, mentoring programs, and educational interventions. However, only about 30 percent of the programs had conducted internal evaluations of their efficacy, and less than 10 percent of the programs had been evaluated rigorously by outside evaluators. And the report mentions only two programs that compared people who received interventions to control groups that did not.7
As I discuss in chapter 2, it is difficult, though not impossible, to test such interventions experimentally. Let’s return to Jane Elliott’s blue eyes/brown eyes exercise to see how it might be done. I am aware of three published studies testing the effectiveness of this exercise or versions of it. It is worth going into some detail about these studies, because they illustrate the challenge of conducting solid experimental tests of interventions.
The first study was conducted in an elementary school in North Carolina in the 1970s. One third-grade class received a version of Elliott’s exercise over a two-day period, though instead of using eye color as the basis for discrimination, the class was divided into “orange” and “green” people and students wore armbands depicting the color of their group. The day after the exercise, and again two weeks later, the students completed a questionnaire measure of racial prejudice and indicated whether they would be willing to go on a picnic with children from a school attended by black students. Another third-grade class served as the control group and completed the same questionnaire, but did not participate in the exercise. As predicted, the students who participated in the exercise expressed less prejudice on the questionnaire and greater willingness to attend the picnic than students who did not, both right after the exercise and two weeks later. These results are promising, though the careful reader will note that the students were not randomly assigned to take part in the exercise or not. In studies such as this that test group exercises, it can be difficult to randomly assign individuals to the experimental condition, and it is not unusual to compare classes that get the intervention to those that do not. However, better studies include several classrooms and randomly assign classes to condition. Further, in studies such as this one, it is important to assess the students’ prejudice before the intervention, to make sure that the students in one class are not more prejudiced to begin with. For example, we have no way of knowing whether the students in the experimental condition of the North Carolina study were less prejudiced than the control group before the exercise or whether the exercise reduced their prejudice.8
The second experiment was conducted in the 1980s among college students in an education course. Students in some sections of the course took part in a three-hour exercise based on Elliott’s technique, in which blue-eyed people were designated as inferior to brown-eyed people. Three weeks before the exercise, and four weeks after, students in all the sections were given two questionnaires that assessed racial prejudice. One measured how comfortable people were with having African Americans occupy different social roles (e.g., physician, dance partner), whereas the other measured people’s willingness to speak out in hypothetical instances of discrimination, such as overhearing a store manager refuse to hire an African American. In addition, one year later, the researchers mailed participants a request to donate money to the university’s Martin Luther King, Jr., fellowship fund. The results were mixed. On one measure—people’s willingness to speak out against discrimination—students who took part in the intervention scored significantly higher than students who did not (that is, they said they were more likely to speak out). However, there were no differences between the groups on the other questionnaire measure (students’ comfort level with African Americans in different roles), nor were there differences in the number of students who donated to the fellowship fund.9
The design of this study was better than the North Carolina one, because the researchers measured prejudice before and after the intervention. However, because participants were once again not randomly assigned to condition, we need to be cautious in interpreting the results. Also, the participants in this study were almost all female members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and it is unclear how much the findings can be generalized to other populations.
The third study—the most scientifically rigorous—tested a workshop conducted in 2000 by Jane Elliott herself. The participants were a randomly selected group of white students at a liberal arts college who were unfamiliar with Elliott’s work and who were willing to be randomly assigned either to attend an exercise on intergroup relations or to hear a presentation about intergroup relations (the control group). All participants were told that the exercise might cause stress and physical discomfort. Those randomly assigned to take part in the exercise attended a four-and-a-half-hour session conducted by Elliott like the one described at the beginning of this chapter. In addition, about half the participants attended one or more optional follow-up sessions led by college counselors in the weeks following the exercise. Finally, participants attended a follow-up discussion led by Elliot four weeks after the exercise. Those randomly assigned to the control group filled out questionnaires and attended a lecture-and-discussion section on intergroup relations. To evaluate the effects of the exercise, participants were asked to complete three well-validated questionnaire measures of prejudice four to six weeks after the exercise was completed.
The results were again mixed. On the negative side, no significant differences were found between the intervention and control groups on the Modern Racism Scale, a well-validated measure of whites’ attitudes toward blacks, or in the students’ willingness to form social relationships with African Americans (both groups expressed a very high level of willingness). On the positive side, white students who took part in the exercise indicated greater anger at themselves for having prejudiced thoughts and expressed a significantly greater willingness to form social relationships with Asians and Latinos/Latinas. There was, however, an important caveat to these positive results. Of the sixteen white students who took part in the exercise, only thirteen returned to complete the measures of prejudice. Two of the three students who didn’t return had dropped out of the exercise because they found it too distressing. Thus it is not clear whether the modest gains were worth the cost to these two students, or, indeed, whether there would have been a net gain had the opinions of these two students been included.10
Jane Elliott’s blue eyes/brown eyes intervention is one of the oldest and best-known diversity workshops. It is thus striking that, in the years since Elliot invented it, only three studies have been conducted to test its effectiveness, and that only one of those studies was a true experiment with random assignment to condition. After forty years, we do not have a definitive answer to the question of whether the blue eyes/brown eyes prejudice-reduction technique is more like bloodletting or penicillin.
What about less confrontational diversity-training techniques, such as the thousands of programs that businesses and schools have adopted to enlighten and educate their employees and students? As mentioned, few such programs have been tested. Of those that have, the results have been mixed. Some programs, particularly those designed for children, have proven to be ineffective. Some, designed for adults, have been shown to have positive effects on people’s attitudes and behavior. These programs vary widely—they deliver lectures, assign readings, show films, engage people in small group discussions or role-playing, and increase contact with targets of prejudice—and the amount of time that people spend participating in them varies from four to eighty hours.11
What separates the programs that work from those that do not? One thing stands out: the effective programs increase contact between the participants and the targets of prejudice. This finding echoes a long-standing principle in social psychology, namely, that the most effective way to improve relations between groups is to bring them together—under the right conditions.
In 1954, Gordon Allport published a classic book, The Nature of Prejudice, which has informed and inspired generations of social psychologists. Allport pointed to the importance of bringing together members of hostile groups under favorable conditions, namely, when the contact is sanctioned by authorities and when the groups share common goals, have equal status, and engage in cooperative activities. Allport pointed out that there was not much research testing this hypothesis, and embraced the experimental approach, which at the time was in its infancy as a means to test changes in attitudes and social behavior. He noted that when testing the effectiveness of programs to reduce prejudice, “the need for a control group is not often realized by investigators.”12
Social psychologists heeded Allport’s advice and have subsequently conducted hundreds of studies testing the effects of contact on prejudice. Although many are correlational studies that compare people who have contact with members of a target group to those who do not, some are true experiments in which people were randomly assigned to conditions in which they do or do not interact with members of the other group. A recent review of all of these studies—more than five hundred in all—supports Allport’s hypotheses. Bringing groups together under the right conditions is one of the most effective means of reducing prejudice.13
Most of these studies, however, have been conducted in the psychological laboratory. How might we bring people together under the right conditions in everyday life? We can’t force people to hang out with individuals who are different from them, especially under the conditions necessary for prejudice to dissipate (e.g., the different groups having equal status and common goals). Maybe it would work to target an institution in which young people are likely to encounter others of different races, ethnicities, and backgrounds, namely, public schools. One reason school integration is so important is because it creates an opportunity for contact between diverse groups. But integration alone is insufficient (as we saw in the tree incident in Jena, Louisiana). Educators need to go the extra mile to ensure that Allport’s conditions for contact to work are met.14
One of the best ways to do this is with cooperative learning techniques, in which students of different races and ethnic backgrounds work together to solve a problem. There are several versions of cooperative learning, but each tries to capture the conditions that Allport said were necessary to reduce prejudice: the contact between members of different groups is sanctioned by authorities (for example, teachers initiate and support the exercises), each member has equal status within the group, the groups share common goals (e.g., they all want to succeed academically), and to achieve those goals they must cooperate with each other. For example, in one technique, called the jigsaw classroom, the class is divided into groups of six, each consisting of students of diverse backgrounds. Each group is given an assignment, such as writing a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the members of the group are each given materials relating to different parts of the assignment—such as descriptions of individual periods in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life. Thus, to succeed, each member has to combine what he or she knows with the information held by each of the other group members, as though they were putting together the pieces of a puzzle. This procedure encourages cooperation between group members and increases the likelihood that they get to know one another as individuals instead of “one of those ______ [fill in the blank—blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, poor kids, rich kids, or whatever].”15
A recent review of studies that tested the effectiveness of cooperative learning techniques (such as the jigsaw classroom) found encouraging results. In sixteen of the nineteen studies reviewed, students in the cooperative learning groups were more likely to develop friendships with members of other racial or ethnic groups. The cooperative learning groups also had positive effects on academic achievement—the kids learned more than the kids in the control conditions did.16
Social psychologists continue to examine the exact conditions under which contact is beneficial. Some researchers suggest that the key is to get people to view the members of other groups as unique individuals, thereby breaking down stereotypes about the group. For example, once Jake learns that Mei Li is a talented athlete and that Jiangguo likes to watch Seinfeld reruns, it is harder for him to maintain his stereotype that Asian Americans are academic overachievers with few outside interests. Other researchers argue that it is better to get people to have positive interactions with people they view as representative members of another group—otherwise, it is too easy to subtype a person as an exception to the rule (“I like Mei Li and Jiangguo, but they aren’t typical Asian Americans”). A third view holds that it is important to get people to redraw group boundaries so that people they previously viewed as outside the group (e.g., “She’s Asian, I’m white”) are now viewed as part of their in-group (“We’re all students at State U”). Research on the effects of contact continues and is addressing how it can best bring about positive change.17
How can the story-editing approach reduce prejudice? Are there simple ways of changing people’s viewpoints that can reduce barriers between members of different groups? The social psychologist Robyn Mallett and I decided to find out. Our starting point was the contact hypothesis, which, as we have already seen, suggests that the best way to reduce prejudice is to increase contact between groups under favorable conditions. But in everyday life, people are often reluctant to initiate friendships with people of different races—not necessarily because they are prejudiced, but because they are worried that it will be awkward or that their efforts will be rebuffed.
Imagine, for example, that you have accepted a position with a telecommunications company and it is your first day on the job. You spend the morning filling out forms and attending orientation sessions until it is time for a break, during which you and several of the other new employees go to the cafeteria for a snack. After paying for your coffee and muffin, you look around for a place to sit and notice that there are empty places at only two tables. At one are three white coworkers, and at the other are three black coworkers, all of whom you met earlier at the orientation session. You hesitate, unsure what to do. Should you join your white or black colleagues? Research shows that people are reluctant to cross racial lines in situations such as this one; if you are white you would likely join the white coworkers, and if you are black you would likely join the black coworkers.
The reason for your choice, however, is not necessarily that you are prejudiced. In fact, you might be interested in getting to know the black coworkers (if you are white) or the white coworkers (if you are black), but are unsure whether they are interested in getting to know you. “I’d really like to sit with Mary, Jason, and Janelle,” you might think. “But it could be awkward; they probably want to be by themselves.” Ironically, they might be thinking the same thing—that they wouldn’t mind if you sat at their table but they aren’t sure whether you really want to. One series of studies, for example, found that white and black college students were both interested in forming interracial friendships but each believed that the other group would likely spurn such overtures.18
You might also assume that you don’t have much in common with your coworkers of a different race, when in fact you do. When the only thing we know about someone is that he or she is a member of a different race, we tend to overestimate our differences and underestimate what we have in common—such as the fact that we both like (or dislike) NASCAR racing, the Food Network, dogs, golf, or whatever. Thus, you might worry that you wouldn’t have much to talk about, when in fact you would quickly find common ground (“You have a Labrador retriever? So do I!”).19
Robyn Mallett and I found that, for these reasons, whites do, in fact, overestimate how awkward and negative an interaction with a black person will be. White college students predicted that a get-acquainted conversation with a black student would be awkward, but when they actually had the conversation, it was no more awkward than a get-acquainted conversation with a white student—in fact, it went surprisingly well. Maybe, then, whites just need a little story editing to convince them that such interactions won’t be as uncomfortable as they think. That is, maybe we can redirect their narratives from “I don’t have much in common with blacks and they probably won’t want to get to know me” to “Maybe we do have a lot in common and they are as open to being friends with me as I am with them.”
Here is how we tried to do it: we showed white University of Virginia students, at the beginning of their first semester of college, a videotaped interview of two other UVa students who had become friends. In the course of the interview, the students mentioned that they didn’t think they would become friends at first, but that they discovered that they had a lot in common and enjoyed spending time with each other. Some participants saw a version of this interview in which the friends were of different races (one white, one black), whereas others (randomly assigned, of course) saw a version in which both the friends were white. We figured that white first-year students who saw the interracial friends might change their views of what it would be like to make friends with someone of another race, because, after all, it went well for the students in the video.
Hearing about one successful interracial friendship might not be a strong enough story prompt, however, because the participants could easily explain it away as a special case that doesn’t apply to them. To increase the likelihood that the message would hit home, we asked some of the students to write about a time when they didn’t think they would become friends with a person but were wrong. We hoped that seeing the video of the interracial friendship, and connecting it to themselves by writing about a time when they formed an unexpected friendship, would make first-year students more open to interracial friendships in their own lives.
To find out, we included several measures of participants’ openness to interacting with members of other races. First, at the end of the session, we videotaped participants (with their permission) while they were interviewed by an African American research assistant. We then coded the videotapes to see how nervous participants appeared during this interview. As we expected, the students who saw the interracial video and completed the writing exercise were the least nervous, compared to those who did neither of those things or just one of them. Further, this openness generalized beyond the experimental session. The participants in the interracial-video-and-writing condition, compared to participants in the other conditions, were more likely to become friends with people of other races in the weeks after the experiment.
How do we know this? We didn’t, of course, follow our participants around with clipboards, observing whom they talked with at parties or whom they sat next to in the dining hall. Instead, participants responded to an Internet survey on which they wrote down the initials of people they had met during the week after the study whom they thought were potential friends, and then indicated the race of each of these people. The participants who had seen the interracial video and completed the writing exercise wrote down a higher proportion of minorities on their lists of potential friends than did the participants in the other conditions.
It is possible, of course, that our participants were not being completely honest; maybe they exaggerated the number of their black potential friends to make themselves look open-minded. To rule out this possibility, we used a more subtle way of measuring participants’ friendship patterns—we looked at their Facebook pages. We asked participants for permission to access their Facebook profiles, though we did not tell them that we would be checking on the race of their friends (nor did participants know that the study was about cross-race friendships). About two weeks after people participated in our study, we checked their Facebook profiles and counted how many friends they had who shared their university affiliation. We assumed that because students had only been enrolled in college for a few weeks, most friends with the same university affiliation would be new acquaintances. Adding a friend on Facebook automatically adds a picture of the new friend to the student’s profile, and we used these pictures to categorize each new friend as white or nonwhite. As we anticipated, participants who saw the cross-race friendship videos and did the writing exercise had a higher proportion of nonwhite friends on their Facebook pages than did participants in the other conditions.20
Will these results generalize to non–college students? Or even to those who have settled into college life for a longer time period than our participants had? We don’t know. Most people have frequent opportunities to make new friends, however, such as in the workplace, in the neighborhood, or at the dog park—and we hope that our story-editing approach can be adapted to situations such as these, thereby lowering barriers to interracial friendships.
One thing we do know is that once people form cross-group friendships, good things can happen. Researchers at Berkeley randomly assigned Latino/a and white students to friendship pairs that met for three one-hour sessions, during which they engaged in friendship-building tasks such as playing games and taking turns disclosing information about their personal backgrounds. Students who were initially prejudiced or anxious about being rejected by the other group showed signs of stress when they met their friendship partner for the first time, just as we would expect from people who are nervous about cross-group interactions. By the end of the third meeting, however, the students were much more relaxed and comfortable with their new friends. Further, those who were initially prejudiced were especially likely to initiate interactions with different members of the other group—that is, with people other than the partner they had been assigned in the study. The bottom line is that interactions with members of different ethnicities and races often go better than we think, and forming friendships with members of other groups breaks down barriers between groups.21
How, you might wonder, could we “scale up” the kind of intervention Robyn Mallett and I devised, delivering it more broadly to people outside of the psychological laboratory? One possibility would be for policy makers to harness the power of the popular media. We saw in the previous chapter that the media can have negative effects: adolescents who see movie actors smoke cigarettes are more likely to begin smoking. But perhaps we could use the media to our advantage by showing positive role models. Television and radio programs have in fact been used to convey positive messages that have led to widespread behavioral changes. In the East African nation of Tanzania, for example, population growth has been a problem; the number of residents of the country more than tripled between the years 1948 and 1992. To address this problem, the ministry of health sponsored a radio drama in which popular characters engaged in family planning. The program was broadcast nationally for two years in the 1990s, except to an area of the country that served as a control group. People living in the areas in which the program was broadcast increased their use of family planning significantly more than people in the area that was blacked out. In many other countries, television and radio dramas have targeted an array of problems, including the transmission of AIDS, illiteracy, the subjugation of women, and environmental issues.
Most relevant to the topic of intergroup relations, a radio drama in Rwanda attempted to promote ethnic reconciliation ten years after the infamous 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which a staggering 75 percent of the country’s Tutsi ethnic minority were killed. Considerable distrust remains in the country, as former killers, victims, and refugees try to live together and deal with their tragic past. The radio drama portrayed conflict between the majority Hutu population and the minority Tutsis in a manner that paralleled the actual events, but in the drama, members of the different groups banded together and spoke out against violence. There was an open discussion of the roots of violence and prejudice, and friendships between Hutus and Tutsis were portrayed. There was even a Romeo-and-Juliet-like romance between a pair of Hutu and Tutsi lovers, though instead of meeting a tragic end, the couple thrived and founded a youth group that promoted peace and cooperation.
Did the radio drama influence people’s attitudes and behavior? To find out, a researcher randomly assigned residents of Rwandan villages to hear either the drama about reconciliation or a different radio drama about health. The villagers who heard the reconciliation drama, compared to those who heard the health drama, subsequently expressed more empathy and trust toward their fellow Rwandans and became more in favor of marriage between members of different ethnic groups.22
These interventions would be even more powerful if they helped viewers and listeners connect the dramas to their own experiences—as Robyn Mallett and I tried to do with our writing exercise. Some television and radio dramas have, in fact, attempted to do just this, by including epilogues in which a famous actor explains how people can apply the lessons to their everyday lives.
Of course, we can change our own behavior even if we don’t listen to radio dramas. We all find ourselves in situations in which we want to start a conversation with someone who looks interesting, but hesitate because the person is of a different race or disabled or from another culture, and we aren’t sure whether we’ll have enough in common with the person to make the conversation go well, or whether the person is interested in talking with us. More than likely, the other person is having similar thoughts (“Surely he [or she] won’t want to talk with me”). But if we take a chance and go over and say hello, we might discover that we have more in common than we thought, and that people we’re interested in are perfectly willing to get to know us. The next time you are in such a situation, smile and say hello and see where the conversation takes you. You might make a new friend who shares your fondness for dogs, sushi, the Beatles, designer shoes, gardening, or whatever your interests happen to be.
In closing, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if the town officials in Jena, Louisiana, had tried some of the approaches outlined in this chapter. The interventions aren’t magical, and would have been particularly hard to implement in the highly charged atmosphere that surrounded the racial incident at the high school. But surely it would have been better to try one of these approaches than to cut down the lone tree in the sun-baked school yard.