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Revisiting the Obama Effect: Exposure to Obama reduces implicit prejudice
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011) 499–501
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / j e s p
FlashReport
Revisiting the Obama Effect: Exposure to Obama reduces implicit prejudice Corey Columb, E. Ashby Plant ⁎ Florida State University FL, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 21 September 2010 Revised 19 November 2010 Available online 2 December 2010 Keywords: Implicit prejudice Attitude change Prejudice reduction Exemplar
a b s t r a c t The present research experimentally evaluated whether exposure to Barack Obama, a positive counterstereotypic exemplar, can result in a decrease in implicit anti-Black prejudice among non-Black participants. In order to undo any existing influence of exposure to Obama, we first exposed some participants to negative Black exemplars. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions where they were exposed subtly to negative Black exemplars, to negative Black exemplars and then Obama, or to neutral X's (i.e., control). Participants who were only primed with negative Black exemplars showed more implicit negativity toward Black people compared to the control group. Participants exposed to the same negative Black exemplars and then Obama showed a decrease in implicit racial bias levels compared to those in the negative exemplar only condition, providing experimental evidence that exposure to Obama can decrease implicit racial bias levels. These findings indicate that even subtle exposure to a positive, counter-stereotypic exemplar can reduce implicit prejudice. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction From the outset of Barack Obama's historic and highly publicized campaign for the presidency of the United States, psychologists began to explore his impact on interracial relations and intergroup bias (e.g., Cooper, 2009). In one examination into these issues, we demonstrated that during Obama's presidential campaign non-Black Americans were responding with less implicit anti-Black prejudice than in previous examinations at the same institutions and elsewhere (Plant et al., 2009; also see Bernstein, Young, & Claypool, 2010). We argued that the high levels of exposure to Obama, a positive and counterstereotypic exemplar, during his presidential campaign had resulted in the reduction in implicit racial prejudice, which we termed the “Obama Effect”. Supporting this claim, evidence indicated that the low levels of implicit prejudice were due to exposure to Obama. For example, participants who associated “Black” with qualities strongly linked with Obama (e.g., president) tended to respond with particularly low levels of implicit prejudice. Although suggestive, these findings were correlational and a strong case could not be made that exposure to Obama caused the decrease in prejudice. Further complicating the issue, Schmidt and Nosek (2010) examined a large sample of participants' implicit racial prejudice scores collected from a public-access website during Obama's presidential campaign and did not see a decrease in implicit prejudice during Obama's campaign for president. Given the inconsistent findings regarding the impact of exposure to Obama on ⁎ Corresponding author. Department of Psychology, Florida State University, P.O. Box 3064301, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4301. E-mail address: [email protected] (E.A. Plant). 0022-1031/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.11.012
implicit prejudice, we wanted to examine directly and experimentally whether exposure to Obama can result in a decrease in implicit antiBlack prejudice. The premise that exposure to positive exemplars from social groups can decrease implicit prejudice toward those groups is supported by previous research (e.g., Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001; Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). For example, Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) demonstrated that people exposed to multiple positive Black exemplars and negative White exemplars exhibit less implicit negativity toward Black people, relative to control. Thus, high levels of exposure to Obama, who is considered by many to be a positive, counter-stereotypic exemplar, could similarly result in reduced implicit prejudice. In order to experimentally examine this important issue, we were faced with a difficult task. As the U.S. president, exposure to Obama was already high, and our previous work indicated that as a result of this exposure, many non-Black people were not responding with implicit racial bias (Plant et al., 2009). Therefore, we would need to undo the Obama Effect and put people in a similar mental state as they were before extensive exposure to Obama. In some ways we saw our task as analogous to examining whether a new medication that already had been extensively administered to the general public could have been responsible for the subsequent decrease in a virus. How do you prove that the medication was the cause of this decrease? One approach is to re-infect a small group with the virus and administer the medication to see if it removes the virus. This is akin to the approach we took in the current work. We primed some participants with Black exemplars that were viewed negatively at the time (e.g. O.J. Simpson), which we predicted would result in the activation of negative associations about Black people and, therefore, increase implicit
500
C. Columb, E.A. Plant / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011) 499–501
prejudice. If exposure to a positive exemplar was responsible for the decrease in implicit prejudice, then exposure to negative exemplars had the potential to undo this effect. We then primed some of these participants with Obama to see whether exposure to Obama resulted in less implicit prejudice than for participants only primed with the negative exemplars. As a comparison, we included a control condition with neutral primes. The current approach both allowed us to directly test whether exposure to Obama could result in a decrease in implicit prejudice and advanced our understanding of the role that exemplars can play in influencing group attitudes. Although mounting work points to the positive implications of exposure to positive exemplars (e.g., Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001; Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001), to our knowledge few previous studies have examined the implications of negative exemplars, and those that have did not find an effect of exposure (e.g., Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). Recent theorizing argues that implicit attitude change occurs when the automatic associations surrounding that attitude are altered (Conrey, Sherman, Gawronski, Hugenberg, & Groom, 2005; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). For example, the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model posits that, rather than acting as a stable evaluation, our attitudes to a given stimulus are constructed based on what is currently activated in our memory at the time of exposure to that stimulus (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). According to this model, our recent exposure to Black people, positive or negative, should influence our subsequent response to a novel Black person. Thus, recent or extensive exposure to negative Black exemplars would likely result in the activation of negative associations with Black people when next exposed to a Black person, leading to high levels of implicit negativity toward that Black person. If many non-Black people traditionally had negative associations and exemplars activated when exposed to Black people (as was indicated by the high levels of negative racial bias on implicit measures), additional exposure to negative exemplars may not have altered responses on implicit prejudice measures since it would not alter the pattern of activation in memory. However, we argue that recent high levels of exposure to Obama should have changed the qualities automatically activated when many non-Black people are exposed to Black people. As a result, it may be that for many non-Black people, exposure to negative Black exemplars would at least temporarily modify the pattern of activation in memory, altering their implicit associations with Black people and causing an increase in implicit racial bias. Because we collected data closely following the election of Obama, when exposure to him was extremely high, we anticipated that our control group of participants would exhibit relatively low levels of implicit prejudice consistent with recent examinations (i.e. Plant et al., 2009). In addition, we hypothesized that participants who were exposed to negative exemplars would exhibit an increase in implicit prejudice toward Black people, relative to the control group. We further hypothesized that people who were exposed to the same negative exemplars but then were exposed to Barack Obama would respond with less implicit prejudice than those only exposed to the negative exemplars. We predicted that the group exposed to Obama following the negative exemplars would respond with a similarly low level of implicit bias compared to the control group.
were both preceded and followed by a string of random letters as a mask (see Perdue, Dovidio, Gurtman, & Tyler, 1990; Perdue & Gurtman, 1990; Plant et al., 2009). Participants completed two sets of 24 trails. In the control condition, participants were primed with X's for both sets of trials. In the negative exemplar condition, participants were primed with three negative Black exemplars (O.J. Simpson, Chris Brown, and Michael Vick) in random order for the first set and primed with X's for the second set. In the negative then Obama condition, the first set of trials exposed participants to the negative exemplars and the second set exposed them to ‘Obama.’ The negative exemplar primes were selected based on pilot testing, which indicated that at the time we conducted the study these three men were all well-known and perceived negatively by undergraduates at our University. All participants next completed the Black/White implicit association task (IAT) assessing implicit prejudice. Importantly, we did not explain the purpose of this measure but only provided instructions how to complete the computer task. On key trials of the IAT participants categorize men's faces as Black or White and simultaneously categorize words as good or bad (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). The logic underlying the IAT is that the dual categorization task should be easier, and therefore completed more quickly, when the associated concepts share a response key (e.g., Black faces and negative words) than with the reverse pairings (e.g., Black faces and positive words). Afterwards, participants completed a packet including a 10-item version of the Attitudes toward Blacks questionnaire (α = .86; ATB, Brigham, 1992), which has participants rate their agreement with items such as “Black and White people are inherently equal.” on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Also included were questions asking about political party affiliation and approval of Obama's performance as president. Participants were then carefully probed for suspicion regarding the nature of the primes and purpose of the experiment, debriefed, and dismissed.
Results IAT D-Scores were calculated following the procedures outlined by Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji (2003), and all analyses were conducted with political party affiliation and their approval of Obama's performance as covariates (the results did not differ with the removal of these covariates). Analyses of the IAT D-scores revealed a significant effect of condition, F(2, 46) = 4.40, p b .05, partial η2 = .16 (see Figure 1). Participants responded with less prejudice in the Obama condition (M = .06, SD = .22) than the negative exemplar condition (M = .27, SD = .20, F(1, 46) = 8.36, p b .01, partial η2 = .15). Also noteworthy, the D-score in the Obama condition did not differ from 0, p = .24. In addition, participants responded with less prejudice in the control (M = .12, SD = .21) than the negative exemplar condition, (F(1, 46) = 4.08, p = .05, partial η2 = .08). Responses did not differ between the Obama and control 0.35 0.3
Fifty-one non-Black Introductory Psychology students (73.6% women; 76.4% White, 21.6% Hispanic) participated in exchange for partial course credit. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (Negative, Negative then Obama, or Control). In all conditions, participants completed a lexical decision task where they were presented with a string of letters and categorized whether the string was a word or nonword. Before each letter string, participants were subliminally primed (55 ms) with a name or a string of X's that
D Score
0.25
Method
0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0
Obama
Negative
Control
Fig. 1. The effect of exemplar prime on IAT scores.
C. Columb, E.A. Plant / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011) 499–501
conditions, p = .45. The experimental condition did not have any influence on explicit prejudice, F(2, 46) = .63, p = .50. Discussion The current study tested the hypothesis that exposure to Barack Obama, a positive and counter-stereotypic exemplar, can result in a decrease in implicit anti-Black prejudice among non-Black people. We argue that the low levels of implicit anti-Black prejudice apparent in our previous work and in the control condition of our current study were due, at least in part, to the high levels of exposure to Barack Obama in recent years. In order to provide evidence that exposure to Obama can reduce implicit prejudice, we designed an experiment to undo Obama's hypothesized positive impact on implicit anti-Black prejudice. Specifically, we exposed participants to negative Black exemplars in order to see if subsequent exposure to Obama could result in a reduction of prejudice. After exposure to negative exemplars, participants responded with heightened levels of antiBlack implicit prejudice more akin to pre-Obama levels of prejudice. Importantly, however, subtle exposure to Obama following these negative exemplars resulted in low levels of prejudice consistent with control levels. These findings provide direct evidence that exposure to Obama can reduce implicit prejudice. In addition, the fact that responses in the Obama condition were similar to those in the control condition lends further support to the idea that exposure to Obama may have resulted in a decrease on the average level of implicit antiBlack prejudice among non-Black people in the United States. This reduction in implicit prejudice is promising because implicit prejudice tends to influence difficult to control responses that result in intergroup tension and discrimination (Devine, 1989; Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002; Payne, 2001). Furthermore, the majority of previously tested approaches to implicit prejudice reduction drew upon techniques that require conscious attention and effort from the individual in order to reduce prejudice (e.g., Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). This research provides an example of prejudice reduction that does not require conscious attention or effort directed toward prejudice reduction. These findings suggest that simply having repeated exposure to even one positive, counter-stereotypic exemplar can subtly influence implicit associations and attitudes. It is also worth noting that, to our knowledge, this research is the first that has demonstrated an effect of negative exemplars on implicit attitudes with exposure to negative exemplars resulting in higher levels of anti-Black prejudice compared to control. These findings provide support for the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model, which posits that our attitudes are constructed based upon our current situation and recent experiences (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). We argue that high amounts of exposure to Obama resulted in changing the standard pattern of activation after exposure to a Black person to one that is positive, resulting in no or low levels of implicit racial bias. However, this also means that being exposed to negative exemplars can affect levels of implicit racial bias because it would activate different and more negative associations. At first glance, these findings appear to be inconsistent with those found by Schmidt and Nosek (2010), who did not find lower levels of implicit racial bias on their online version of the IAT during the presidential election as compared to prior assessments. One reason for the difference in findings could stem from the fact that participants in Schmidt and Nosek's sample knew they were completing a measure of racial prejudice and that there is a tendency for bias against Black people on that particular measure. Most White people are aware of the stereotype that White people are prejudiced against other racial groups (Frantz, Cuddy, Burnett, Ray, & Hart, 2004; Vorauer et al., 1998) and this expectation is reinforced on the website Schmidt and Nosek used, which tells people that “most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black.” Bringing participants attention to the fact that the IAT is a measure of racial prejudice that
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frequently reveals anti-Black prejudice combined with the stereotype of White's racial prejudice could act like a stereotype threat for White people, leading to heightened levels of implicit prejudice on the IAT (Frantz et al., 2004). It is possible that these stereotype threat concerns were overriding the Obama Effect for those who participated in the Schmidt and Nosek (2010) online study, resulting in heightened implicit prejudice scores. The present research shows the power of environmental forces on our attitudes. The people and images we encounter, even at a subliminal level, can greatly affect our attitudes toward social groups more generally. The current work provides many avenues for future work, including exploring whether the impact of exposure to Obama will change over time in response to his perceived positivity. In addition, it will be important to examine whether these effects generalize to other samples beyond undergraduate students. Although additional work is needed to fully examine these issues, we think the results are heartening and speak to the influence that even the subtlest exposure to positive and negative role models has on people's associations and attitudes about social groups. Acknowledgments This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant BCS-0544598 awarded to the second author. References Bernstein, M. J., Young, S. G., & Claypool, H. M. (2010). Is Obama's win a gain for Blacks?: Changes in implicit racial prejudice following the 2008 Election. Social Psychology, 41, 147−151. Blair, I. V., Ma, J. E., & Lenton, A. P. (2001). Imagining stereotypes away: the moderations of implicit stereotypes through mental imagery. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5), 828−841. Brigham, J. C. (1992). College students' racial attitudes. Journal of Applied and Social Psychology, 23, 1933−1967. Conrey, F. R., Sherman, J. W., Gawronski, B., Hugenberg, K., & Groom, C. J. (2005). Separating multiple processes in implicit social cognition: the quad model of implicit task performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(4), 469−487. Cooper, J. (2009). Special section on the social psychological impact of the election of Barak Obama. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 952−969. Dasgupta, N., & Asgari, S. (2004). Seeing is believing: Exposure to counterstereotypic women leaders and its effect on the malleability of automatic gender stereotyping. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(5), 642−658. Dasgupta, N., & Greenwald, A. G. (2001). On the malleability of automatic attitudes: Combating automatic prejudice with images of admired and disliked individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5), 800−814. Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(1), 5−18. Dovidio, J. F., Kawakami, K., & Gaertner, S. L. (2002). Implicit and explicit prejudice and interracial interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(1), 62−68. Frantz, C. M., Cuddy, A. J. C., Burnett, M., Ray, H., & Hart, A. (2004). A threat in the computer: the race implicit association test as a stereotype threat experience. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(12), 1611−1624. Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2006). Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: an integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological Bulletin, 132(5), 692−731. Greenwald, A. G., Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2003). Understanding and using the implicit association test: I. An improved algorithm.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 197−216. Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464−1480. Schmidt, K., & Nosek, B. A. (2010). Implicit (and explicit) racial attitudes barely changed during Barack Obama's presidential campaign and early presidency. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(2), 308−314. Payne, B. K. (2001). Prejudice and perception: the role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(2), 181−192. Perdue, C. W., Dovidio, J. F., Gurtman, M. B., & Tyler, R. B. (1990). Us and them: Social categorization and the process of intergroup bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 475−486. Perdue, C. W., & Gurtman, M. B. (1990). Evidence for the automaticity of ageism. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 26, 199−216. Plant, E. A., Devine, P. G., Cox, W. T. L., Columb, C., Miller, S. L., Goplen, J., & Peruche, B. M. (2009). The Obama Effect: Decreasing implicit prejudice and stereotyping. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 961−964. Vorauer, J., Main, K. J., & O'Connell, G. (1998). How do individuals expect to be viewed by members of lower status groups? Content and implications of meta-stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 917−937.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / j e s p
FlashReport
Revisiting the Obama Effect: Exposure to Obama reduces implicit prejudice Corey Columb, E. Ashby Plant ⁎ Florida State University FL, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 21 September 2010 Revised 19 November 2010 Available online 2 December 2010 Keywords: Implicit prejudice Attitude change Prejudice reduction Exemplar
a b s t r a c t The present research experimentally evaluated whether exposure to Barack Obama, a positive counterstereotypic exemplar, can result in a decrease in implicit anti-Black prejudice among non-Black participants. In order to undo any existing influence of exposure to Obama, we first exposed some participants to negative Black exemplars. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions where they were exposed subtly to negative Black exemplars, to negative Black exemplars and then Obama, or to neutral X's (i.e., control). Participants who were only primed with negative Black exemplars showed more implicit negativity toward Black people compared to the control group. Participants exposed to the same negative Black exemplars and then Obama showed a decrease in implicit racial bias levels compared to those in the negative exemplar only condition, providing experimental evidence that exposure to Obama can decrease implicit racial bias levels. These findings indicate that even subtle exposure to a positive, counter-stereotypic exemplar can reduce implicit prejudice. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction From the outset of Barack Obama's historic and highly publicized campaign for the presidency of the United States, psychologists began to explore his impact on interracial relations and intergroup bias (e.g., Cooper, 2009). In one examination into these issues, we demonstrated that during Obama's presidential campaign non-Black Americans were responding with less implicit anti-Black prejudice than in previous examinations at the same institutions and elsewhere (Plant et al., 2009; also see Bernstein, Young, & Claypool, 2010). We argued that the high levels of exposure to Obama, a positive and counterstereotypic exemplar, during his presidential campaign had resulted in the reduction in implicit racial prejudice, which we termed the “Obama Effect”. Supporting this claim, evidence indicated that the low levels of implicit prejudice were due to exposure to Obama. For example, participants who associated “Black” with qualities strongly linked with Obama (e.g., president) tended to respond with particularly low levels of implicit prejudice. Although suggestive, these findings were correlational and a strong case could not be made that exposure to Obama caused the decrease in prejudice. Further complicating the issue, Schmidt and Nosek (2010) examined a large sample of participants' implicit racial prejudice scores collected from a public-access website during Obama's presidential campaign and did not see a decrease in implicit prejudice during Obama's campaign for president. Given the inconsistent findings regarding the impact of exposure to Obama on ⁎ Corresponding author. Department of Psychology, Florida State University, P.O. Box 3064301, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4301. E-mail address: [email protected] (E.A. Plant). 0022-1031/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.11.012
implicit prejudice, we wanted to examine directly and experimentally whether exposure to Obama can result in a decrease in implicit antiBlack prejudice. The premise that exposure to positive exemplars from social groups can decrease implicit prejudice toward those groups is supported by previous research (e.g., Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001; Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). For example, Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) demonstrated that people exposed to multiple positive Black exemplars and negative White exemplars exhibit less implicit negativity toward Black people, relative to control. Thus, high levels of exposure to Obama, who is considered by many to be a positive, counter-stereotypic exemplar, could similarly result in reduced implicit prejudice. In order to experimentally examine this important issue, we were faced with a difficult task. As the U.S. president, exposure to Obama was already high, and our previous work indicated that as a result of this exposure, many non-Black people were not responding with implicit racial bias (Plant et al., 2009). Therefore, we would need to undo the Obama Effect and put people in a similar mental state as they were before extensive exposure to Obama. In some ways we saw our task as analogous to examining whether a new medication that already had been extensively administered to the general public could have been responsible for the subsequent decrease in a virus. How do you prove that the medication was the cause of this decrease? One approach is to re-infect a small group with the virus and administer the medication to see if it removes the virus. This is akin to the approach we took in the current work. We primed some participants with Black exemplars that were viewed negatively at the time (e.g. O.J. Simpson), which we predicted would result in the activation of negative associations about Black people and, therefore, increase implicit
500
C. Columb, E.A. Plant / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011) 499–501
prejudice. If exposure to a positive exemplar was responsible for the decrease in implicit prejudice, then exposure to negative exemplars had the potential to undo this effect. We then primed some of these participants with Obama to see whether exposure to Obama resulted in less implicit prejudice than for participants only primed with the negative exemplars. As a comparison, we included a control condition with neutral primes. The current approach both allowed us to directly test whether exposure to Obama could result in a decrease in implicit prejudice and advanced our understanding of the role that exemplars can play in influencing group attitudes. Although mounting work points to the positive implications of exposure to positive exemplars (e.g., Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001; Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001), to our knowledge few previous studies have examined the implications of negative exemplars, and those that have did not find an effect of exposure (e.g., Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). Recent theorizing argues that implicit attitude change occurs when the automatic associations surrounding that attitude are altered (Conrey, Sherman, Gawronski, Hugenberg, & Groom, 2005; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). For example, the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model posits that, rather than acting as a stable evaluation, our attitudes to a given stimulus are constructed based on what is currently activated in our memory at the time of exposure to that stimulus (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). According to this model, our recent exposure to Black people, positive or negative, should influence our subsequent response to a novel Black person. Thus, recent or extensive exposure to negative Black exemplars would likely result in the activation of negative associations with Black people when next exposed to a Black person, leading to high levels of implicit negativity toward that Black person. If many non-Black people traditionally had negative associations and exemplars activated when exposed to Black people (as was indicated by the high levels of negative racial bias on implicit measures), additional exposure to negative exemplars may not have altered responses on implicit prejudice measures since it would not alter the pattern of activation in memory. However, we argue that recent high levels of exposure to Obama should have changed the qualities automatically activated when many non-Black people are exposed to Black people. As a result, it may be that for many non-Black people, exposure to negative Black exemplars would at least temporarily modify the pattern of activation in memory, altering their implicit associations with Black people and causing an increase in implicit racial bias. Because we collected data closely following the election of Obama, when exposure to him was extremely high, we anticipated that our control group of participants would exhibit relatively low levels of implicit prejudice consistent with recent examinations (i.e. Plant et al., 2009). In addition, we hypothesized that participants who were exposed to negative exemplars would exhibit an increase in implicit prejudice toward Black people, relative to the control group. We further hypothesized that people who were exposed to the same negative exemplars but then were exposed to Barack Obama would respond with less implicit prejudice than those only exposed to the negative exemplars. We predicted that the group exposed to Obama following the negative exemplars would respond with a similarly low level of implicit bias compared to the control group.
were both preceded and followed by a string of random letters as a mask (see Perdue, Dovidio, Gurtman, & Tyler, 1990; Perdue & Gurtman, 1990; Plant et al., 2009). Participants completed two sets of 24 trails. In the control condition, participants were primed with X's for both sets of trials. In the negative exemplar condition, participants were primed with three negative Black exemplars (O.J. Simpson, Chris Brown, and Michael Vick) in random order for the first set and primed with X's for the second set. In the negative then Obama condition, the first set of trials exposed participants to the negative exemplars and the second set exposed them to ‘Obama.’ The negative exemplar primes were selected based on pilot testing, which indicated that at the time we conducted the study these three men were all well-known and perceived negatively by undergraduates at our University. All participants next completed the Black/White implicit association task (IAT) assessing implicit prejudice. Importantly, we did not explain the purpose of this measure but only provided instructions how to complete the computer task. On key trials of the IAT participants categorize men's faces as Black or White and simultaneously categorize words as good or bad (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). The logic underlying the IAT is that the dual categorization task should be easier, and therefore completed more quickly, when the associated concepts share a response key (e.g., Black faces and negative words) than with the reverse pairings (e.g., Black faces and positive words). Afterwards, participants completed a packet including a 10-item version of the Attitudes toward Blacks questionnaire (α = .86; ATB, Brigham, 1992), which has participants rate their agreement with items such as “Black and White people are inherently equal.” on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Also included were questions asking about political party affiliation and approval of Obama's performance as president. Participants were then carefully probed for suspicion regarding the nature of the primes and purpose of the experiment, debriefed, and dismissed.
Results IAT D-Scores were calculated following the procedures outlined by Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji (2003), and all analyses were conducted with political party affiliation and their approval of Obama's performance as covariates (the results did not differ with the removal of these covariates). Analyses of the IAT D-scores revealed a significant effect of condition, F(2, 46) = 4.40, p b .05, partial η2 = .16 (see Figure 1). Participants responded with less prejudice in the Obama condition (M = .06, SD = .22) than the negative exemplar condition (M = .27, SD = .20, F(1, 46) = 8.36, p b .01, partial η2 = .15). Also noteworthy, the D-score in the Obama condition did not differ from 0, p = .24. In addition, participants responded with less prejudice in the control (M = .12, SD = .21) than the negative exemplar condition, (F(1, 46) = 4.08, p = .05, partial η2 = .08). Responses did not differ between the Obama and control 0.35 0.3
Fifty-one non-Black Introductory Psychology students (73.6% women; 76.4% White, 21.6% Hispanic) participated in exchange for partial course credit. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (Negative, Negative then Obama, or Control). In all conditions, participants completed a lexical decision task where they were presented with a string of letters and categorized whether the string was a word or nonword. Before each letter string, participants were subliminally primed (55 ms) with a name or a string of X's that
D Score
0.25
Method
0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0
Obama
Negative
Control
Fig. 1. The effect of exemplar prime on IAT scores.
C. Columb, E.A. Plant / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011) 499–501
conditions, p = .45. The experimental condition did not have any influence on explicit prejudice, F(2, 46) = .63, p = .50. Discussion The current study tested the hypothesis that exposure to Barack Obama, a positive and counter-stereotypic exemplar, can result in a decrease in implicit anti-Black prejudice among non-Black people. We argue that the low levels of implicit anti-Black prejudice apparent in our previous work and in the control condition of our current study were due, at least in part, to the high levels of exposure to Barack Obama in recent years. In order to provide evidence that exposure to Obama can reduce implicit prejudice, we designed an experiment to undo Obama's hypothesized positive impact on implicit anti-Black prejudice. Specifically, we exposed participants to negative Black exemplars in order to see if subsequent exposure to Obama could result in a reduction of prejudice. After exposure to negative exemplars, participants responded with heightened levels of antiBlack implicit prejudice more akin to pre-Obama levels of prejudice. Importantly, however, subtle exposure to Obama following these negative exemplars resulted in low levels of prejudice consistent with control levels. These findings provide direct evidence that exposure to Obama can reduce implicit prejudice. In addition, the fact that responses in the Obama condition were similar to those in the control condition lends further support to the idea that exposure to Obama may have resulted in a decrease on the average level of implicit antiBlack prejudice among non-Black people in the United States. This reduction in implicit prejudice is promising because implicit prejudice tends to influence difficult to control responses that result in intergroup tension and discrimination (Devine, 1989; Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002; Payne, 2001). Furthermore, the majority of previously tested approaches to implicit prejudice reduction drew upon techniques that require conscious attention and effort from the individual in order to reduce prejudice (e.g., Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). This research provides an example of prejudice reduction that does not require conscious attention or effort directed toward prejudice reduction. These findings suggest that simply having repeated exposure to even one positive, counter-stereotypic exemplar can subtly influence implicit associations and attitudes. It is also worth noting that, to our knowledge, this research is the first that has demonstrated an effect of negative exemplars on implicit attitudes with exposure to negative exemplars resulting in higher levels of anti-Black prejudice compared to control. These findings provide support for the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model, which posits that our attitudes are constructed based upon our current situation and recent experiences (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). We argue that high amounts of exposure to Obama resulted in changing the standard pattern of activation after exposure to a Black person to one that is positive, resulting in no or low levels of implicit racial bias. However, this also means that being exposed to negative exemplars can affect levels of implicit racial bias because it would activate different and more negative associations. At first glance, these findings appear to be inconsistent with those found by Schmidt and Nosek (2010), who did not find lower levels of implicit racial bias on their online version of the IAT during the presidential election as compared to prior assessments. One reason for the difference in findings could stem from the fact that participants in Schmidt and Nosek's sample knew they were completing a measure of racial prejudice and that there is a tendency for bias against Black people on that particular measure. Most White people are aware of the stereotype that White people are prejudiced against other racial groups (Frantz, Cuddy, Burnett, Ray, & Hart, 2004; Vorauer et al., 1998) and this expectation is reinforced on the website Schmidt and Nosek used, which tells people that “most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black.” Bringing participants attention to the fact that the IAT is a measure of racial prejudice that
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frequently reveals anti-Black prejudice combined with the stereotype of White's racial prejudice could act like a stereotype threat for White people, leading to heightened levels of implicit prejudice on the IAT (Frantz et al., 2004). It is possible that these stereotype threat concerns were overriding the Obama Effect for those who participated in the Schmidt and Nosek (2010) online study, resulting in heightened implicit prejudice scores. The present research shows the power of environmental forces on our attitudes. The people and images we encounter, even at a subliminal level, can greatly affect our attitudes toward social groups more generally. The current work provides many avenues for future work, including exploring whether the impact of exposure to Obama will change over time in response to his perceived positivity. In addition, it will be important to examine whether these effects generalize to other samples beyond undergraduate students. Although additional work is needed to fully examine these issues, we think the results are heartening and speak to the influence that even the subtlest exposure to positive and negative role models has on people's associations and attitudes about social groups. Acknowledgments This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant BCS-0544598 awarded to the second author. References Bernstein, M. J., Young, S. G., & Claypool, H. M. (2010). Is Obama's win a gain for Blacks?: Changes in implicit racial prejudice following the 2008 Election. Social Psychology, 41, 147−151. Blair, I. V., Ma, J. E., & Lenton, A. P. (2001). Imagining stereotypes away: the moderations of implicit stereotypes through mental imagery. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5), 828−841. Brigham, J. C. (1992). College students' racial attitudes. Journal of Applied and Social Psychology, 23, 1933−1967. Conrey, F. R., Sherman, J. W., Gawronski, B., Hugenberg, K., & Groom, C. J. (2005). 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