Method 

Participants One hundred forty-one [...] introductory psychology students [...].

Materials 

Two variations of empathy instructions and a control set of instructions were used in conjunction with two versions of scenarios involving acts of discrimination.

The racial out-group scenarios were presented to students as a set of short essays written in the first person by African American freshmen[...].

These students were said to have been given the assignment of writing about their personal experiences with discrimination as part of a creative writing class.

The in-group scenarios [...] were presented as having been written by American students attending a University in Hong Kong.

The empathy instructions employed in this study were similar to those used in past empathy studies [...].

One type of instructions requested that participants take the perspective of the authors of the scenarios.

The second type of empathy instructions requested that participants attend to their own emotions, as if they were the authors of the scenarios [...].

[...] an additional control condition, in which neither scenarios nor instructions were provided, was included.

The participants completed five dependent variables.

Design

[...] design was a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial.

[...] a trailer control condition, in which participants were not given empathy instructions and did not receive any scenarios but were asked to respond to the dependent variables, was included in the relevant analyses.

Procedure 

The participants were run in groups of 2 to 12. The participants were randomly assigned to the conditions. Before receiving any materials, all participants, except those in the trailer control groups, were told that the researchers were replicating a study that had been conducted originally at another university concern- ing memory for emotionally laden scenarios. The students were told that after completing this study, they would be participating in an impression-formation study and would finish by completing a pilot study for some future research on various ethnic groups. Participants in the experimental conditions were then informed that they would be asked to read several students’ class assignments, and they were given one of the three empathy instructions [...].

Following the instructions, these students read one of the two types of scenarios and then received a one-page “memory” questionnaire [...].

Following the memory task, all participants in the experimental conditions were given an interpolated task consistent with the impression-formation part of the cover story and were then told that the third study in which they would be asked to participate involved obtaining baseline attitudes about a number of ethnic groups.

The participants (including those in the trailer control condition who had not received any of the previous tasks) were told that many ethnic groups were being evaluated, but because of time constraints, they would be asked to evaluate only a subset of them.