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

0022-1031/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.12.003 * Corresponding author. Fax: +1 434 982 4766. E-mail address: [email protected] (B.A. Nosek). 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. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.