What did the scientists want to know, what did they do to find out, did they find what they expected?

Velasquez-Manoff in his paper, “Want to Be Less Racist? Move To Hawaii” writes extensively about the varying levels of stereotyping in the U.S. and the influence of being the minority has on ones beliefs. In combination with his own experiences he chose to include a study conducted by Kristin Pauker, Yiyuan Xu, Amanda Williams and Ashley M. Biddle. These four worked together from three separate Universities including University of Bristol, and of Hawai’i at Manoa. The goal of the experiment that these experts ran was to determine the extent of racial stereotyping in ages 4-11 and was achieved through running a series of tests in which a, “Children completed measures assessing race salience, race essentialism, and in-group and out-group stereotyping,” (Pauker, Xu, Williams, Biddle). What they discovered was that context was extremely pertinent to how the children perceived each person. This shows that racism is not a natural instinct but instead a product of poor parenting or a hostile environment that they have instead been exposed to while growing up. In both groups there was a slight upwards trend in relation to racial stereotyping but those from Massachusetts displayed a higher level of it in their out-groups. Massachusetts is a predominantly white state, which is hypothesized to be a driving cause behind this. Compare the population diversity of Massachusetts to that of Hawaii and we immediately can see the correlation. It is hard to comb through all of the potential lurking variables but judging the data solely off of the experiment’s restrictions, we can conclude that there is a high correlation between racial stereotyping and upbringing as expected by the scientists.