Americans remain unaware of the magnitude of economic inequality in the nation and the degree to which it is patterned by race. We exposed a community sample of respondents to one of three interventions designed to promote a more realistic understanding of the Black–White wealth gap. The interventions conformed to recommendations in messaging about racial inequality drawn from the social sciences yet differed in how they highlighted data-based trends in Black–White wealth inequality, a single personal narrative, or both. Data interventions were more effective than the narrative in both shifting how people talk about racial wealth inequality—eliciting less speech about personal achievement—and, critically, lowering estimates of Black–White wealth equality for at least 18 mo following baseline, which aligned more with federal estimates of the Black–White wealth gap. Findings from this study highlight how data, along with current recommendations in the social sciences, can be leveraged to promote more accurate understandings of the magnitude of racial inequality in society, laying the necessary groundwork for messaging about equity-enhancing policy.

美国人仍然没有意识到国家经济不平等的严重程度以及种族对它的影响程度。我们让社区样本的受访者接受了旨在促进对黑白贫富差距的更现实理解的三种干预措施之一。这些干预措施符合社会科学中关于种族不平等的信息传递建议，但不同之处在于它们如何强调基于数据的黑人-白人财富不平等趋势、单一的个人叙述，或两者兼而有之。数据干预在改变人们谈论种族财富不平等的方式方面比叙事更有效——引发更少关于个人成就的言论——并且重要的是，在基线后至少 18 个月内降低对黑人-白人财富平等的估计，这更符合联邦政府对黑白贫富差距的估计。这项研究的结果强调了如何利用数据以及社会科学中当前的建议来促进对社会中种族不平等程度的更准确的理解，为关于加强公平政策的信息传递奠定必要的基础。