Concerning our key outcome—belief in essential racial differences—we are not aware of any evaluations of the extent to which such measures may be subject to social desirability bias. However, two facts minimize our concern about such bias in our assessment. First, our conclusions rest on differences in belief in racial differences between groups that have been randomly assigned to read different news stories. Any social desirability bias should affect all groups to a similar extent and should not affect differences between groups. Second, this measure varied significantly, as predicted, among vignette conditions and did so in a pattern quite different from the pattern of stated acceptance of each vignette’s validity, which indicates participants’ interpretation of the social acceptability of the vignette message. If social desirability bias strongly affected stated belief in racial differences, we would expect the patterns for acceptance and for belief in racial difference to be similar—a finding we did not observe.
