LAUSR

In our original paper (1) we argued that social knowledge plays a meaningful role in minority salience (MS), partly basing our conclusion on findings from Experiment 5, where the effect of MS is larger when the minority of stimuli is composed of Black (vs. White) Americans. Gayet et al. (2) tested the hypothesis that the effect in Experiment 5 is driven by low-level characteristics of the display, not social knowledge. In Experiment 1 Gayet et al. (2) examine whether a visual change to the background (white vs. black) moderates the effect of social knowledge. They report a threeway interaction, supporting the idea that visual aspects do play a role. Note, however, that the role of social knowledge in this experiment is best evidenced in the 2 × 2 interaction of ethnicity and minority. Crucially, it is significant [(F(1,185) = 8.17, P = 0.005], above and beyond background color. In other words, Gayet et al.’s (2) data indicate that social knowledge does play a role in the MS effect. To further test this, we ran a preregistered replication of our Experiment 5 adding a white vs. black background condition (n = 200).* Like in Gayet et al.’s data, the ethnicity × minority interaction is significant [F(1,183) = 144.27, P < 0.001, ηP = 0.44]. Moreover, this interaction is significant within both black and white background (P < 0.001; see Fig. 1). Given these patterns it is perhaps not surprising that the three-way interaction reported by Gayet et al. (2) is not significant. These results further support for the role of social knowledge in MS. In Experiment 2, Gayet et al. (2) argue that the same pattern of results may be obtained with nonsocial stimuli (light vs. dark gray circles), suggesting that the MS effect is not social in nature. There are three points we wish to make here. First, the methodology of Experiment 2 is meaningfully different from Experiment 1 (and our Experiment 5), making direct comparisons difficult. Second, even if one ignores the first point, the authors report no quantitative comparisons to support their conclusion. Finally,