Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Different Sides Of The Same Conversation: Black And White Partners Differ In Perceptions Of Interaction Content, Michael Olson, Camille Johnson, Kevin Zabel, Joy Phillips

Faculty Publications, School of Management

A positive interracial interaction can create a foundation for friendships, improved intergroup attitudes and reduced prejudice. Recent research has demonstrated that what people talk about in important. Here, two studies expand the interaction content model of interracial interactions to reveal that Black and White Americans perceive interaction content in similar and different ways. As expected, Black and White participants evaluated conversation topics along the same three dimensions, but differed in their perceptions of specific conversation topics. These convergences and differences emerged for pre‐generated (Study 1) and self‐generated (Study 2) topics. Factor analyses revealed that conversation attributes similarly distilled to the …