What if you could practice a difficult conversation in your head to feel less anxious about it in real life? Researchers tested this idea to see if White adults could reduce their anxiety and prejudice toward Black people by first imagining a negative or neutral interaction, followed by a positive one. They ran two online studies with hundreds of participants, comparing this mental exercise to just imagining positive interactions.
The results were not what the researchers hoped. In the first study, people who did the 'negative-then-positive' imagining actually reported higher anxiety afterward. But when they ran a second, similar study, that increase in anxiety didn't happen again. Across both studies, the mental exercise did not significantly reduce prejudice or make people more willing to have contact with Black individuals.
This was a preregistered study, meaning the researchers publicly stated their plan and predictions beforehand, which adds weight to the finding that their main hypothesis wasn't supported. The fact that the anxiety result from the first study didn't show up in the second one means we can't be confident the effect is real or reliable. For now, this specific mental exercise doesn't appear to be a simple solution for reducing intergroup anxiety or prejudice.