Obama Effect, The
In 1995, two Stanford psychologists, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, demonstrated that African-American college students did worse on tests of academic ability when they were exposed beforehand to suggestions that they were being judged according to their race. Steele and Aronson hypothesized that this effect, which they labeled stereotype threat, might explain part of the persistent achievement gap between white and black students. In the years since, this idea has spread throughout the social sciences. Experimental studies have detected the negative effect of stereotype threat on a wide variety of groups, including women, old people, student-athletes at Swarthmore College and Ecstasy users.Last year, a week before the Democratic National Convention, David M. Marx, an assistant professor of psychology at San Diego State University, was sitting at a conference with a couple of colleagues when talk turned to the presidential election. What would the rise of Barack Obama, they wondered, do to the stereotype threat experienced by African-Americans? Their idle contemplation quickly turned into a research project, and they quickly designed an experiment to measure what they called the Obama effect. At a series of moments during the 2008 campaign, Marx and his colleagues gave tests of verbal ability to selected black and white students after first priming them to focus on racial stereotypes of academic performance.
BARACK OBAMAILLUSTRATION BY CATH RILEYIn a paper published this year in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Marx and his colleagues reported that there was indeed an Obama effect, though it had certain limitations. Right after Obama's speech in Denver accepting the Democratic nomination, for instance, the