As you might surmise, our real interest was in how participants arranged the chairs, in particular, how close they placed their chair to the chairs of their two black conversation partners. These two distances—the distances between the participant’s chair and the chairs of each of the two black conversation partners—were the basis of our measure of associational preference. We presumed that the greater these distances, like the choice of the more distant seat in the dental office, the less comfortable they anticipated being in the conversation.
The man in black vs the Sicilian. (The two groups of experimental subjects were eh e men who were about to discuss love/relationships or racial profiling with two African Americans they didn’t already know)
Result: chairs farther apart when anticipating discussing racial profiling.
But, again, we’re the two groups blind to the researcher in the room or not?
