Developing the HeART: Tracking Racial Heterogeneity in Fiction Reading Habits

Tracing the stories people have read may help us understand their beliefs and social attitudes. In this study, we develop and validate a scale to measure racial diversity in people's fiction reading: the Heterogeneous Author Recognition Test (HeART). To validate the scale, participants completed the HeART alongside measures of vocabulary, reading comprehension, and self-reported reading habits. Our results suggest that the HeART is a valid measure of (1) how much people read overall and (2) the racial composition of people's reading habits. Initial results also suggest that more diverse reading habits are associated with lower anti-Black prejudice. Together, these findings validate the HeART as a measure of the racial diversity in individuals' long-term reading habits that may facilitate research on the relationship between habitual race-specific reading and interpersonal attitudes.