Different (Race) Cards in the Deck: Directness and Denials in Racial Messaging

This document contains the pre-analysis plans for an experiment conducted through Lucid. This experiment evaluates two primary things - the effects of implicitly and explicitly racial messages and the role of racial denials. The design includes a full crossing of these elements, including a control condition without any references to race - as a result, the experiment uses a 3 (control, implicit, explicit) by 2 (no denial, denial) design. The experiment involves a sample of 1800 white, American adults and was conducted online late in September of 2019. This document was posted after data collection but prior to any analyses. Our primary hypotheses touch on the validity of new findings in the racial messaging research and novel ideas about the role that partisanship, racial sensitivity, and racial denials play in understanding how citizens respond to elite messages about race.