The following is an excerpt of the intervention methodology. For more information, please see the full text of the article on the publisher's website or through your institution's library.

Participants

The study consisted of 150 students from the University of Missouri, Columbia [...].

Design

[...] students completed a questionnaire in which they indicated their political party membership. The relative size of the two social categories in the setting (four in the majority and two in the minority) and the role assignment to subgroup tasks (cross-cut or con-vergenl) were thus manipulated in a 2 x 2 factorial design. Assignment to these two conditions was random. Each six-person team was either all female or all male [...].

Procedure

The experiment had three phases: (a) subgroup task, (b) team task, and (c) completion of dependent measures. The tasks were selected because prior research showed that they were very involving for students [...]. After entering the laboratory, participants were greeted by two experimenters and were asked to place stickers on their shirts that displayed their social category and experimental code numbers. One experimenter informed the participants that the purpose of the study was to better understand how members of distinct groups work together. Participants were also told that there would be two phases during the session and that during the first phase, they would work in two subgroups on a task related to space travel. Each subgroup would make a slightly different contribution to the team task and then later, during the second phase, both groups would work together to complete a team task. In the convergent task condition, all four members of one social category (either Democrat or Republican) comprised one subgroup and the two members of the other social category comprised the other subgroup. Subgroup task phase. The members of each subgroup were taken to separate rooms, in which they generated a list of traits that would be helpful for astronauts when dealing with the cognitive stress or emotional stress induced by space travel. Two types of response sheets were supplied to each subgroup. The subgroups were told that they would bring only this group list to the subsequent team phase. The team, composed of the members of both subgroups, was asked to reach consensus by choosing the six most important traits associated with both types of stress cognitive and emotional. [...] team members were told that they should support each decision with an explanatory sentence. Team members were also encouraged to make additional trait suggestions (to generate a more thoughtful discussion) and were told that they had ample time to reach consensus. The teams were then instructed that their final products should be as good as possible and that they would be given adequate time to complete them. Participants were further told that their products would be judged [...]. Completion of response measures. After completing the team phase, participants were told to move apart and away from the team table and were given clipboards on which to answer the dependent measures. For the trait evaluation, participants were asked to rate each team member on a series of traits that included the following: [Text A]. Seven-point Likert-type scales followed each trait question. For reward allocation, the written instructions asked participants to allocate rewards to themselves and to every member of their team. [...] after making their reward allocations and trait ratings, participants responded to two questions regarding how much they were aware of their social categories.