the experimenter gave the participants an instruction. He said that tension was natural in a discussion of racial profiling, that it was difficult for everyone. He said they should treat the conversation as a learning experience—that is, try to learn what they could about the issue and, more generally, about how to talk about charged issues with people who might have differing perspectives. Under this instruction, white male participants moved their chairs close to their black partner, as close as they were in any of the other groups in the experiment.
This freed subjects from thinking about being portrayed as racist and removed the “chair gap” from earlier wxperimenta
