Abstract
With almost half of the US population’s race and ethnicity being non-white (census.gov, 2019), intergroup contact between White and Non-White individuals is bound to happen. Nevertheless, people still tend to self-segregate into their own mono-racial or mono-ethnic social groups because intergroup interactions are often stressful (Richeson & Shelton, 2007; Richeson & Shelton, 2003; Murphy et al., 2011). One way to reduce distress and anxiety around intergroup contact is to promote the belief that prejudice is malleable and that people can work on reducing their biases. Therefore, we primed participants with a prejudice belief (fixed or malleable) and measured their motivation. An independent-samples t-test was run to determine if there were differences in dependent variables between participants primed with either a fixed or malleable prejudice belief. However, we did not find any statistically significant differences in any of our analyses, most likely due to it being underpowered. While the current research did not find any statistically significant difference in all of our analyses, previous studies (i.e., Halperin et al., 2012, and Neel and Shaprio, 2012) have demonstrated that there is a connection between individuals’ malleable prejudice belief and motivation to engage in intergroup contact. Because this connection is important, as it could be an effective tool to use in reducing individuals’ biases against out-group members, a future investigation with stronger power is necessary. Thus, we will continue to collect data and will run the analysis again once we have reached the calculated sample size for adequate power of at least 102.