It was a small study, really 鈥� the seed of research to examine political beliefs among college students and the bridging of partisan divides.

Noting that conservative students in particular, might feel isolated on campus, in 2017 the 天美影视传媒鈥檚 and his students designed a half-day workshop to help a couple dozen participants understand each other better, then followed up a month later to see how their opinions about political 鈥渙thers鈥� had changed, if at all. Kanter, a research associate professor of psychology who studies how to help people improve their relationships, thought he might be able to use the data to inform a future study, perhaps expand the workshops and reach more people. The research, focused on improving empathy and connection among college students of different political persuasions, published in October in the earlier this fall and spread quickly through the world of conservative media.

Kanter said he hadn鈥檛 sought any media coverage, believing the study sample too small to justify widespread attention. And the coverage the study did receive, which Kanter said took several statements from the article out of context, seemingly gave voice to the very biases and prejudices he was trying to work against.

鈥淥ur study was about trying to improve relations between people on opposite sides of the political spectrum, and it worked fairly well,鈥� Kanter said, 鈥渂ut the media picked up on and ran with this idea that liberal students simply hate conservatives, which really wasn鈥檛 the point.鈥�

Published in October in the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, the described the workshop Kanter and his team designed. The half-day session relied on an intervention model that promotes awareness of people鈥檚 personal histories as a way of understanding their politics, and fosters positive personal interactions to combat prejudices. Conducted in the summer of 2017, the study 鈥� called 鈥淗ealing the Political Divide鈥� 鈥� drew 23 UW students. Of these, five students who identified as conservative and five who identified as liberal were assigned to do a workshop together. The other students served as various controls.

During the workshop sessions, participants did not focus on political ideology until the end. Instead, the focus was on discussing life experiences that informed their beliefs and values, and simply getting to know each other in a personal way. Participants were surveyed before, immediately after, and a month following the workshop to gauge their feelings about conservatives and liberals. Questions ranged from those about workshop expectations to those that measured levels of , a good-versus-evil framing of political beliefs 鈥� such as the level of agreement with a statement, 鈥淭he country would be better off if most liberals just packed up and left,鈥� for example.

鈥淭here was a grain of truth in what the media said, in that the liberal students were a bit higher than the conservatives on political Manichaeism before the workshops,鈥� Kanter explained. 鈥淛ust as conservative media often portrays liberals inaccurately, liberals are also guilty of negatively and inaccurately stereotyping average conservatives because of what their own media feeds them.鈥�

Kanter and his team, led by graduate student Katherine Manbeck, found that immediately after the workshop, almost all participants had substantially improved attitudes about people with different political ideologies. According to the study, students 鈥渆xpressed surprise that the workshops did not deteriorate into arguments,鈥� felt closer to their fellow participants and would recommend the workshop to others.

But those effects didn鈥檛 last, Kanter said, at least not for political beliefs on the whole.

The surveys a month later showed that, while participants continued to hold positive views of the other students in the workshop, in general they didn鈥檛 sustain the same degree of understanding of, let alone affinity for, conservatives or liberals.

鈥淭he workshop had a nice effect on participants鈥� attitudes toward each other, and that effect lasted,鈥� Kanter said, 鈥渂ut after spending a month soaking up all the news and current events, previous attitudes about others in general essentially snapped back into place.鈥�

This may be the crux of the issue, he added. Today鈥檚 strident, emotional political environment may eclipse people鈥檚 ability to cultivate a lasting, peaceable understanding of opposing points of view writ large. The media coverage of Kanter鈥檚 own study drove that point home.

鈥淲e made the point in our study that the current political climate is so toxic, it is almost impossible to reach out and connect with those who are different from you right now. And the media sort of proved that point,鈥� Kanter said. 鈥淚t is too bad, because the students we worked with in this study are all pretty cool individuals once you get to know them, and trying to connect with and understand each other is important.鈥�

Inroads, though, start somewhere. In their study, Kanter and his co-authors noted that even a short-term detente based on personal acquaintance 鈥� such as that created in the study 鈥� can, for instance, ease family get-togethers or other group-oriented situations. Kanter said he鈥檇 like to expand the workshops to larger, even more diverse groups. The political climate, after all, hasn鈥檛 changed.

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For more information, contact Kanter at jonkan@uw.edu.

Blatant racism is easy to identify 鈥� a shouted racial slur, a white supremacist rally, or the open discrimination, segregation and violence of the pre-civil rights era.

But more subtle forms of bias, called , emerge in the everyday exchanges among friends and strangers alike and can offend racial and ethnic minorities.

Such statements, uttered intentionally or inadvertently, draw upon stereotypes and are linked with racism and prejudice, according to a 天美影视传媒-led study. The research is believed to be the first of its kind to explore microaggressions from the perspective of those who commit them, and suggests that whites who are more likely to deliver microaggressions are also more likely to harbor some degree of negative feeling toward blacks, whether they know it or not.

The concept of microaggressions has garnered greater attention in today’s political environment, explained lead author , a UW research associate professor of psychology.

“Our study results offer validation to people of color when they experience microaggressions. Their reactions can’t simply be dismissed as crazy, unreasonable or too sensitive,” Kanter said. “According to our data, the reaction of a person of color 鈥� being confused, upset or offended in some way 鈥� makes sense, because they have experienced what our data show: that people who are more likely to make these comments also are more racist in other ways.”

The appears online in the journal Race and Social Problems.

For this study, the team, with the help of focus groups of students of color from three universities, devised the Cultural Cognitions and Actions Survey (CCAS) and administered it to a small group of students 鈥� 33 black, 118 white 鈥� at a large public university in the Midwest. The 56-item questionnaire asks the white respondent to imagine him- or herself in five different everyday scenarios involving interactions with black people, such as talking about current events, attending a diversity workshop, or listening to music. The respondent then considers how likely he or she is to think or say specific statements. For black respondents, the wording of the scenarios and questions was revised slightly to assess whether they would experience racism. Each of the statements included in the survey was deemed at least somewhat, if not significantly, offensive by black students.

In the “current events” scenario 鈥� the one that yielded the highest percentage of “likely” responses from whites 鈥� respondents were to imagine talking about topics in the news, such as police brutality and unemployment. More than half of white respondents said they would think or say, “All lives matter, not just black lives,” while 30 percent said they might say, “I don’t think of black people as black,” and 26 percent said they were likely to think or say, “The police have a tough job. It is not their fault if they occasionally make a mistake.” More than half of black respondents identified each of those statements as racist.

Responses on the CCAS were then related to several validated measures of racism and prejudice, to determine if one鈥檚 likelihood of making microaggressive statements was related to these other measures. An additional scale controlled for social desirability 鈥� the idea that respondents might answer in ways that put themselves in the best possible light.

Results indicated that white students who said they were more likely to make microaggressive statements were also significantly more likely to score higher on all the other measures of racism and prejudice, and results were not affected by social desirability.

The statement that yielded the highest statistical relation to other measures of racism among white respondents came from the “diversity workshop” scenario, in which a class discusses white privilege. Though only about 14 percent of white respondents said they were likely to think or say, “A lot of minorities are too sensitive,” the statement had the highest correlation with negative feelings toward blacks. Nearly 94 percent of black respondents said the statement was racist.

The correlations between statements and attitudes are averages from the study sample, Kanter said, and so the results do not address the intentions or feelings of any one person.

“It doesn’t mean that on a case-by-case basis, if you or I engaged in microaggressions, that we have cold or racist feelings toward blacks,” he said. “But the study says that regardless of the intention behind a microaggression or the feelings of the specific person who uttered it, it’s reasonable for a black person to be offended. On average, if you engage in a microaggression, it’s more likely that you have cooler feelings toward black people, and that whether you intended it or not, you’ve participated in an experience of racism for a black person.”

In many ways, overt racism has declined gradually since the civil rights movement, Kanter said, and white people often assume that because they do not utter racial slurs, or perhaps are well-versed in and value social justice, that they do not have to worry about engaging in racist behavior themselves.

“It can come as a bit of a shock to a lot of white people that their behavior and attitudes are under scrutiny,” said Kanter, who pointed out that as a white male, he has had to confront realizations about his own behavior over time. “The nature of how we’re looking at racism is changing. We’re now able to look at and root out more subtle forms of bias that weren’t focused on before because explicit racism was taking a lot of the attention.”

Taken in isolation, the size and location of the study sample limit the generalizations that can be made, Kanter said. But the idea behind the CCAS is to use it elsewhere and adapt it to focus on other racial and ethnic minorities so as to better understand racism and develop educational tools to combat it. The survey has since been used at the 天美影视传媒, he added, where early results are very similar to those reported in the published article.

Kanter said he’s heard from critics who say the study has a liberal bias, or that the research should examine offenses against white people. But he says the point is to address racism targeted at oppressed and stigmatized groups.

“We’re interested in developing interventions to help people interact with each other better, to develop trusting, nonoffensive, interracial relationships among people. If we want to decrease racism, then we need to try to decrease microaggressions,” he said.

Other authors of the study were UW graduate students and ; of the University of Connecticut, of the University of Kentucky; and of Bastyr University.

The study was funded by a grant from the American Psychological Foundation.

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For more information, contact Kanter at 206-221-2591 or jonkan@uw.edu.