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

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 (). With a very large, heterogeneous sample collected daily for 2.5years 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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]