Implicit (and explicit) racial attitudes barely changed during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and early presidency

By Kathleen Schmidt, Brian A. Nosek. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2010

100 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract As a high-status, omnipresent Black exemplar, Barack Obama and his rise to the presidency of the United States may have induced a cultural shift in implicit racial attitudes, much like controlled exposures to positive Black and negative White exemplars have done in the laboratory ( Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001 ). With a very large, heterogeneous sample collected daily for 2.5 years prior to, during and after the 2008 election season (N = 479,405), we observed very little evidence of systematic change in implicit and explicit racial attitudes overall, within subgroups, or for particular notable dates. Malleability of racial attitudes – implicit or explicit – may be conditional on more features than the mere presence of high-status counter-stereotypic exemplars.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4af78218acdbbbd8528d77ad4bbd1d80b01154c2

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Citations in the corpus

• The Best Way to Measure Explicit Racial Attitudes Is to Ask About Them (2018, result): “The implicit–explicit correlation found here (r¼ .28) was modest and similar to estimates from other online samples (r¼ .33 in Schmidt & Nosek, 2010), and previous work indicates that implicit and explicit attitudes are best understood as separate but related constructs; for instance, a two-factor…”
• Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated With Regional Racial Biases of Residents (2018, background): “Other work has reported the stability of U.S. racial biases over the past decade with this very data set (Schmidt & Nosek, 2010).”
• Lying or Believing? Measuring Preference Falsification From a Political Purge in China (2016, unknown): “In a design that shares the spirit with ours, Schmidt and Nosek (2010), for example, have conducted lab experiments on a large sample collected before, during, and after Obama’s presidential campaign to evaluate changes in explicit and implicit racial attitudes of the subjects.”