In Bell et al.'s (2019) study on the prejudice blindspot, participants rated themselves as less racist than the other student whose responses they reviewed. What was the catch in this study?

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We start by restating the core question: In Bell et al.'s (2019) study on the prejudice blindspot, participants rated themselves as less racist than the other student whose responses they reviewed. What was the catch in this study?

Option 1: The other student's responses were actually their own. This is the key twist. The study presented participants with responses attributed to another student, but those responses were actually generated by the participant themselves or were the participant's own prior responses that were misattributed. The exploit here is that participants judged someone else’s racism based on a set of responses that were not from another person, but from the participant’s own data, leading to a perception gap between self-concept and others’ presented views.

Option 2: The other student rated the participant as more racist. If this had occurred, it would suggest a different kind of bias or error, but the study’s famous catch did not rely on the other person’s rating being higher; it depended on the provenance of the “other student”’s responses and their link to the participant’s own data. Misinterpreting this would miss the actual methodological twist.

Option 3: The other student actually scored the same as participants on the measure of racism. Equal scoring could be expected under some designs, but it does not capture the distinctive manipulation in the prejudice blindspot study, which hinges on misattribution of the other student’s responses rather than on identical scores.

Option 4: The other student was less racist than they were. This option introduces a paradoxical self-comparison where the other student’s supposed level of racism is less than the participant’s, which contradicts the point of the catch unless the design explicitly tested such a comparison. However, it does not reflect the methodological twist of misattributed responses central to the study.

In summary, the central methodological twist is about the source of the stimuli labeled as the “other student” and how participants’ judgments were affected when those stimuli were not actually from a different person, but derived from the participant’s own data or were misattributed in a way that created a bias in perceived racism. The remaining options describe scenarios that do not capture this core catch and thus fail to explain the primary methodological vulnerability highlighted by the study.

In Bell et al.'s (2019) study on the prejudice blindspot, participants rated themselves as less racist than the other student whose responses they reviewed. What was the catch in this study?

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