Friction between different racial and ethnic groups is a story as old as time; World War II was marked by the wrongful internment of Japanese Americans, and more recently tensions have risen again – sometimes violently – between American police and African Americans. But why are we cursed to always seek conflict with our neighbors? Much of the blame lies with a lack of race-based trust – or rather, race-based distrust. This distrust is rooted in human social categorization: people differentiate others into different social groups. By creating in- and out-groups, we differentiate each group by establishing group boundaries based on perceived characteristics. In turn, membership in a group confers social identity, a feeling of belonging. Because of the human tendency to perceive ourselves, and thus our own ingroups, in a positive light, people tend to treat ingroup members more positively than outgroup members – we call this an ingroup positivity bias. Trust is defined as the degree of positivity – whether commendable, hopeful, or good – that one expects from the intentions and behavior of others. In intergroup contexts such as those of racial conflict, intergroup trust is low due to little positivity received and expressed between ingroup and outgroup members. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get an original essayFacing social phenomena, it is also instinctive for people to do amateur science to find the reasons. These faulty explanations, or lay theories, are a person's belief if specific attributes, like race, are linked to malleable characteristics and assuming that the associations are simple social constructs over fixed characteristics and assuming that associations are essential to people belonging to this field. Everyone has cognitive availability for both beliefs; the level of accessibility of a given individual or situation dictates the belief consulted. This accessibility of beliefs is different individually, depending on many factors such as one's developmental experiences, social structure and culture, and the ability of the belief to explain an observed pattern of things. Lay theory of race influences the perceptions and attitudes of others and likely plays a critical role in the formation of trust between groups. As a result, cooperation is then catalyzed between groups and constructiveness in conflict resolution. Kung et al. (2018) conducted a study aimed at improving intergroup situations by attempting to establish a relationship between secular race theory and intergroup trust. They hypothesized that, unlike essentialist beliefs, social constructionist beliefs about race may increase trust toward racial groups in intergroup contexts, based on two arguments. First, people who hold these beliefs are associated with a lower tendency to categorize people according to their race due to their perception that racial boundaries are malleable. The ingroup bias and lower willingness to grant a positive attitude to outgroup members that we observed previously are canceled out by the more positive attitude of these endorsers toward intergroup interactions, which is translated into a better ability to.