**8. Limitations**

### **8.1 Participants**

All participants within this study were undergraduate psychology students attending a large southwestern university. The homogeneity of certain factors, such as education level, environment, and values, may have influenced results and impacted external validity. Future research will benefit from non-college population participants as well as participants from other geographic regions to further generalize results.

Additionally, while the sample had some degree of diversity, certain groups were less represented than others in our participant pool, severely limiting the conclusions that could be drawn on the basis of certain demographics. Though preliminary MANOVA were conducted with participant demographics in mind, we recognize the inherent issues with aggregating the responses of multiple distinct identities in order to have groups large enough to analyze. Future studies should not only recruit for a greater diversity of participants but should also consider the intersections of participant identities such as race, gender, and sexuality.

#### **8.2 Study design**

It is also important to consider that due to the study design, it is difficult to match the race of the participants to their responses to the race of the superheroes. Future studies should focus on the participant and the influences of their identities more than the validation of the hero images that this study focused on.

#### **8.3 Female images**

This work served as a methodological validation of utilizing novel images to assess changes in participant perceptions. However, female images were not depicted in this iteration of the study. Future studies will also manipulate female hero images on the same bases as the men (Race Sexuality).

#### *8.3.1 Research transparency statement*

The authors are willing to share their data, analytics methods, and study materials with other researchers. The material will be available upon request.

## **A. Factor structure**

See **Table 1**.


**Table 1.**

*Results of EFA structure coefficients.*
