TRY NOT TO TRIGGER THE SNOWFLAKES:

We recruited 924 U.S. residents from Amazon's Mechanical Turk for our experiment. Half of the research participants were given a social media post containing the following question: "Should colleges rename buildings that were named after people who actively supported racial inequality?"

The other half saw an identical question, except the term "racial inequality" was swapped with "white privilege." We randomly chose which half received each question.

This random assignment allowed us to show causality - and gave us confidence that the choice of language created the effects we saw.

We asked the participants to respond to their question, and also measured how likely they were to engage with the post in the first place. We then focused on the set of people who were likely to engage with that post online.

The term "white privilege" had two effects.

The first was to decrease the quality of conversation among both whites and non-whites. There were more comments that insulted people, attacked the question itself or simply made no sense.

The second effect was to make the set of responses less supportive of renaming the buildings - and more polarized.

The people who were asked about racial inequality were, on average, very supportive. Those who thought it was a good idea to rename college buildings outnumbered opponents more than 2-to-1.

ut the group that was asked about "white privilege" was strongly divided, with just as many opponents as supporters. This shift was caused completely by a change in some whites.

Use of "white privilege" caused 50% of whites who would have been supportive to become ambivalent or hostile. We don't know which half would have changed their minds. But, due to the experimental design, we can be confident they were there.

In addition, we found that many of the supportive whites just chose to avoid the conversation altogether. While they might have expressed their support for stopping racial inequality, they wouldn't join a conversation about white privilege.

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