Although there has been limited progress toward economic equality between Americans over the past half-century, many Americans are largely unaware of the persistence of economic racial disparities. One intervention for this widespread ignorance is to inform White Americans of the impact of racism on the outcomes of Black Americans. In two studies, we attempted to improve the accuracy of Whites’ perceptions of racial progress and estimates of contemporary racial economic equality. Reminding White Americans about the persistence of racial disparities produced smaller overestimates of how much progress had been made toward racial economic equality between 1963 and 2016. Rather than modifying overestimates of contemporary racial economic equality, participants who read about disparities assessed the past as more equitable than participants who did not. We discuss implications of these findings for efforts to address Whites’ misperceptions of racial economic equality and to challenge narratives of American racial progress.

From families to nations, what binds individuals in social groups is, to a large degree, their shared beliefs, norms, and memories. These emergent outcomes are thought to occur because communication among individuals results in community-wide synchronization. Here, we use experimental manipulations in lab-created networks to investigate how the temporal dynamics of conversations shape the formation of collective memories. We show that when individuals that bridge between clusters (i.e., bridge ties) communicate early on in a series of networked interactions, the network reaches higher mnemonic convergence compared to when individuals first interact within clusters (i.e., cluster ties). This effect, we show, is due to the tradeoffs between initial information diversity and accumulated overlap over time. Our approach provides a framework to analyze and design interventions in social networks that optimize information sharing and diminish the likelihood of information bubbles and polarization.

People's beliefs are in uenced by interactions within their communities. The propagation of this in uence through conversational social networks should impact the degree to which community members synchronize their beliefs. To investigate, we recruited a sample of 140 participants and constructed fourteen 10-member communities. Participants rst rated the accuracy of a set of statements (pre-test) and were then provided with relevant evidence about them. Then, participants discussed the statements in a series of conversational interactions, following predetermined network structures (clustered/nonclustered). Finally, they rated the accuracy of the statements again (post-test). The results show that belief synchronization, measuring the increase in belief similarity among individuals within a community from pre-test to post-test, is in uenced by the community's conversational network structure. This synchronization is circumscribed by a degree of separation effect and is equivalent in the clustered and non-clustered networks. We also nd that conversational content predicts belief change from pre-test to post-test.

Racial inequality has been a persistent component of American society since before its inception. This research investigates how lay beliefs about the nature of racism— as primarily due to prejudiced individuals or, rather, to structural factors that disadvantage members of particular racial groups—predict perceptions of (Studies 1A & 1B) and reactions to (Studies 2 & 3) racial inequality in the criminal justice system. Specifically, the current research suggests that holding a more structural (v. interpersonal) racism view predicts a greater tendency to perceive racial inequality in criminal justice. Moreover, White Americans’ lay beliefs regarding racism, coupled with their general level of comfort with societal hierarchy, may predict support for policies that would reduce disparities in mass incarceration. Together, this work suggests that beliefs about the nature of racism—as either interpersonal or structural—may play an important role in how people perceive and respond to racial inequality.