Male Adolescents' and Young Adults' Evaluations of Interracial Exclusion in Offline and Online Settings

While there is a growing body of research on how individuals evaluate interracial exclusion in offline settings, much less is known about evaluations of interracial exclusion in online settings. This study aimed to address this gap by examining evaluations by male adolescents and young adults (N = 151; M_age = 17.59, standard deviation = 0.50) of interracial exclusion in both online and offline settings to understand these evaluations in concert. Furthermore, participants completed measures of offline and online intergroup contact, providing new evidence that intergroup contact in online settings is an important context for learning about others. The findings indicate that participants' online and offline intergroup contacts were related. In terms of evaluations of exclusion, participants were much more likely to attribute exclusion to nonrace-based reasons in online and offline settings than to race-based reasons. Additionally, participants with higher rates of intergroup contact were more likely to perceive race-based exclusion as wrong than those with low rates of contact. The novel findings document that young men's online and offline intergroup contact shape their evaluations of interracial exclusion in online settings.