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.

Method

We recruited participants through the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

Procedure
we randomly assigned participants to one of six intervention conditions (see next section), with different combinations of control and experimental intervention components. After completing the intervention components in Part 1, participants completed outcome measures a second time. After the Part 1 survey, participants received a thank you message and $7 compensation for their participation, along with a reminder that they would be asked to complete a follow-up survey in 3 weeks. Three weeks later, we asked participants to complete Part 2, consisting of the outcome measures and open-ended questions inquiring about the experience and impact of the intervention.

Intervention Components
The independent variable consisted of assignment to one of six intervention conditions with varying sequences of three of the six experimental and control components. Experimental components included imaginal contact, racism understanding and empathy, and privilege and positionality.

Imaginal contact

The current study included a prompt that asked participants to imagine a positive interaction while sitting on a train next to a person of color. The control component prompted participants to imagine a positive, relaxing setting for 2 min

Racism understanding and empathy

The experimental component of racism understanding and empathy included a first-person narrative told from the perspective of a White person who had learned the complexity and negative impact of racism. The narrative included a comprehensive definition of racism and situated the impact of racism in the United States today within a historical context. Additionally, the narrator shared accounts from people of color about personal, emotionally evocative experiences of racism. Within the reading, the narrator shared their own process learning about racism, including misconceptions they had; difficult emotions learning about racism evoked, like guilt; and why it mattered to the narrator to continue learning. The racism empathy and understanding control component was a reading about soup that paralleled the length, structure, and types of information provided in the experimental component (e.g., factual, personal narrative, process of developing understanding and changing attitudes) and qualitative questions after the reading.

White privilege and positionality

The reading for the White privilege and positionality experimental component was told from the first-person perspective of a White person who had developed an awareness of their own White privilege and its impact on their life. The reading included an explanation of White privilege and concrete examples of how it manifests in one’s life, and it explicitly addressed issues of defensiveness through the narrator’s explicit discussion of working through their own negative reactions and the reasons understanding White privilege mattered to them. For the control component, participants completed a reading about ice cream that paralleled the length and structure of the White privilege and positionality experimental component

Combining experimental and control components: The independent variable of intervention conditions

The six intervention conditions included (a) all control components (control condition), (b) imaginal contact only (contact only condition), (c) racism understanding and empathy only (racism only condition), (d) racism understanding and empathy plus White privilege and positionality (racism and privilege condition), (e) imaginal contact plus racism understanding and empathy (contact and racism condition), and (f) all experimental components (full intervention condition). 

Measures

Outcome measures

Outcomes of interest for the current study included warmth towards people of color, color-blind racial ideology, ethnocultural empathy, and White privilege attitudes (i.e., White privilege awareness, White privilege remorse, and willingness to confront White privilege). Participants competed the following scales immediately prior to the intervention, immediately after intervention completion, and 3 weeks later at follow-up.