(dramatic music)
- [Jake] That's the question
that the widespread media coverage
of the 2010 census projection
that white Americans would soon be a minority
triggered for Yale psychologist, Jennifer Richeson.
- I was listening to the radio,
noticed these reports
about the changing demographics of the United States,
getting repeated.
- [Reporter] People of color
accounted for 91.7% of growth.
It's like the future of our country on steroids
and it's happening now.
- [Jennifer] And I would see it on my Twitter feed
or in social media outlets,
these articles about this happening
and I'm thinking, wow, you know,
social psychology suggests that this type of communication
and how it's constructed as majority, minority, right,
or this coming white minority
is probably gonna be threatening to lots of white people,
right, lots of people
who maybe don't think of themselves
in terms of their racial group membership.
But this type of communication
will suddenly make them think of themselves
in terms of their racial group membership
and in a very defensive way
that's likely to lead to the expression of racial bias.
And that's just where we started.
- [Jake] Richeson and colleagues at Northwestern,
conducted a study that was released
before the 2016 presidential election
that was later nicknamed "The Rise of Trump" study.
First, the researchers asked
nearly 1,000 white participants,
what kind of government they favored?
Very conservative,
very liberal or somewhere in between.
Then, they exposed half the participants
to media coverage of the census forecast.
The news that white Americans
would soon make up less than half the population
had been covered by every network.
- [Reporter] For the first time,
minority groups now account
for about half of American children under the age of five.
- [Reporter] Census Bureau figures
show more minority babies
now being born than non-Hispanic whites.
- [Jake] The researchers
exposed the other half of the participants
to entirely different neutral information.
Then, they asked both groups
what kind of government they now favored,
given the information they'd just been exposed to.
The political views
of the group that watched the neutral information
didn't change,
but the views of the group
that watched the news clip
about white people becoming a minority changed dramatically.
- [Jennifer] It led to greater endorsement
of politically conservative positions
on a broad range of policies
from drilling in the Arctic to tax policy,
to healthcare policies.
And of course, what you'd expect,
policies that are most relevant
to racial attitudes and policies.
So immigration policy, affirmative action,
those types things.
- [Jake] To confirm
that the shift toward conservative politics was caused
by fear of the consequences of being a minority,
Jennifer then conducted another version of the study
in which participants
who watched news coverage of the census
were afterwards reassured
about white people's future status in society.
- [Jennifer] We say, you know what,
even in a future
where whites are less than 50% of the population,
because of, you know, any number of factors,
including different access
to education, to jobs, to training,
whites on average will still maintain a dominant status,
meaning access to resources, jobs, political influence.
And so not that much is gonna change actually
in terms of how society operates in,
despite the fact that the numbers are changing.
- [Jake] When they were reassured
that white people would remain dominant,
the people who saw the census information
no longer supported a more conservative government.
It was confirmation
that it was simply being made to feel
that white dominance was threatened,
which had caused them to change their politics.
So it turns out that even in the world's oldest democracy,
you can get people to change their politics
simply by giving them cues
that almost automatically trigger us versus them thinking.
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