The vignette reported in Chapter 4 concerned an interracial conflict over land. We saw enormous racial differences in the reactions to the events portrayed in that scenario; nearly everything about the conflict seemed to be defined in terms of race, at least in the minds of most respondents. Consequently, it is perhaps not surprising that group identities seemed to have been activated by the dispute and that they played an important role in how people judged the controversy.

However, with interracial conflict essentially a constant in that vignette, it is not possible to assess how powerful a role race plays. That is, the type of conflict portrayed in the vignette was the same for all respondents; therefore, this constant could not account for variability in the assessments of the vignette (constants cannot explain variables). A more powerful means of estimating the role of race in identity activation would be to vary the nature of the land conflict from interracial to intraracial. That is precisely the nature of the experimental vignette reported in this chapter.

The purpose of this chapter is therefore to investigate the conflict between claims of injustice grounded in the past versus those grounded in the present, while varying the racial context of the dispute. In order to do so, a second experiment was employed. This vignette includes a manipulation of the races of the disputants in a historical land conflict.