Lab-based interventions have been ineffective in changing individuals’ implicit racial attitudes for more than brief durations, and exposure to high-status Black exemplars like Obama has proven ineffective in shifting societal-level racial attitudes. Antiracist social movements, however, offer a potential societal-level alternative for reducing racial bias. Racial attitudes were examined before and during Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its high points of struggle with 1,369,204 participants from 2009 to 2016. After controlling for changes in participant demographics, overall implicit attitudes were less pro-White during BLM than pre-BLM, became increasingly less pro-White across BLM, and were less pro-White during most periods of high BLM struggle. Considering changes in implicit attitudes by participant race, Whites became less implicitly pro-White during BLM, whereas Blacks showed little change. Regarding explicit attitudes, Whites became less pro-White and Blacks became less pro-Black during BLM, each moving toward an egalitarian “no preference” position.

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was created in July 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The movement’s initiators characterized it as a response to structural anti-Black racism pervading the United States, and “an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (Garza, 2014). “Black lives matter” became the rallying cry of a new social movement that shattered the notion of a “post-racial” America and reoriented national political conversation on anti-Black racism (Petersen-Smith, 2015). Over the past few years, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests have taken place in every major U.S. city. Although the movement has been Black-led, activists of multiple races have marched through neighborhoods and cities, disrupted presidential election campaign events, and occupied malls, police departments, and city halls. Public awareness of BLM is widespread, and nearly twice as many Americans support BLM (43%) as oppose it (22%) (Horowitz & Livingston, 2016). In response to this progressive movement, there have been attempts at countermovements in the form of “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter.” These countermovements, however, have been greatly outnumbered in the streets, and overshadowed in social media and online interest by BLM (Anderson & Hitlin, 2016; see comparison of BLM and countermovement web trends here: https://osf.io/kgqsz/). What impact, if any, might this mass social movement against racism have had on racial attitudes in the United States?

Collectively, BLM has asserted that Black lives should have the same value as those of non-Blacks, and as those of Whites in particular (Chaney & Robertson, 2015). Many accounts of racism posit, as integral to its functioning, the social, political, and psychological construction of racial ingroups and outgroups (e.g., Marks, 1996; Omi & Winant, 2014; Tate & Audette, 2001). Historically in the United States, in an effort to cheaply produce cotton and other commodities, the enslavement of peoples from Africa led to the construction of Black and White racial groups, and the development of racist ideology in an effort to facilitate and justify slavery (Fields, 1990). Notwithstanding the genocide of Native Americans, Blacks and Whites have been the primary racial groups that have anchored racist ideology in the United States, with anti-Black racism mirrored in the ideology of White supremacy (Alexander, 2012). Thus, the emergence of the BLM movement in the United States raises the specific question of what impact, if any, this antiracist social movement has had on Whites’ and Blacks’ implicit and explicit racial attitudes vis-à-vis one another. This study examined whether implicit and explicit racial attitudes changed during the emergence and growth of BLM, as well as during high points of BLM struggle.

Implicit attitudes are generally held to be automatic affective evaluations (favorable or unfavorable) resulting from the associations that are activated automatically when one encounters a relevant stimulus (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Thus, people can harbor implicit biases against social groups without explicitly endorsing them (Nosek, Hawkins, & Frazier, 2011). For instance, high levels of negative associations regarding Blacks may be activated even if these attitudes contrast with individuals’ explicit attitudes (Devine, 1989). Consequently, implicit and explicit attitudes are understood to operate via largely distinct psychological mechanisms (De Houwer, Teige-Mocigemba, Spruyt, & Moors, 2009). In addition, they are generally thought to be subject to distinct formative experiences (Rydell & McConnell, 2006) and thus to entail distinct routes for change (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Importantly, implicit racial biases predict negative interracial contact (McConnell & Leibold, 2001) and discriminatory behaviors, including in hiring, housing, and education (Staats, Capatosto, Wright, & Contractor, 2015). Thus, reducing implicit (and explicit) prejudice is of tremendous theoretical and practical interest (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006).

Laboratory-based research indicates that implicit racial preferences can be shifted over short periods of time in several ways, including changes in emotional states (Dasgupta, Desteno, Williams, & Hunsinger, 2009) and exposure to counterstereotypical exemplars (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). However, there is little evidence for interventions that reduce implicit prejudice over periods longer than a single lab session. One of the few studies tracking lasting changes in individual implicit attitudes found that none of the changes caused by nine effective short-term interventions (e.g., counterstereotypical exemplars, priming multiculturalism, evaluative conditioning) endured after a couple days (Lai et al., 2016). The authors concluded that racial prejudices remain steadfast against efforts to change them, possibly because racially biased messages are so pervasive in U.S. society. Thus, while support exists for the short-term malleability of implicit evaluations, there is scant evidence for long-term individual shifts in evaluation (Lai, Hoffman, & Nosek, 2013).

Similarly, there is little evidence for aggregate (i.e., societal-level) implicit attitude change. However, exploring how and when implicit attitudes change on a societal level is vitally important because even statistically small changes in aggregate attitudes can have impacts on discrimination that are societally meaningful (Greenwald, Banaji, & Nosek, 2015). In addition, aggregate racial attitudes have been found to relate to Black/White health disparities. For instance, counties in which Whites harbor greater implicit and explicit anti-Black bias show increased Black/White disparities in birth weight (Orchard & Price, 2017) and decreased access to health care and poorer health outcomes for Blacks (Leitner, Hehman, Ayduk, & Mendoza-Denton, 2016). To determine the magnitude of changes in attitudes at the societal level, researchers must examine aggregate shifts in mean bias over time. This societal impact may occur because attitude changes lead to changes in behavior that affect many people simultaneously or that affect individual people repeatedly (Greenwald et al., 2015). Note that use of the term “societal-level” in reference to attitude data in these studies (and the current study) should not be taken to imply that the data come from a perfectly representative U.S. national sample, but rather that it contains a very large number of participants from across the nation.

Only four published studies have examined societal-level implicit attitude change (or lack thereof): two focusing on racial attitudes (Schmidt & Axt, 2016; Schmidt & Nosek, 2010) and two on attitudes toward sexual orientation (Inbar, Westgate, Pizarro, & Nosek, 2016; Westgate, Riskind, & Nosek, 2015). The race-relevant studies on implicit attitudes investigated the society-level impact of the “Obama effect.” This effect posits that Barack Obama’s rise to the U.S. presidency represented the embodiment of a high-status Black exemplar, unprecedented in scope and visibility, that had the power to induce a societal shift in implicit racial attitudes (Plant et al., 2009). In some lab experiments with relatively small samples, exposure to Obama as a counterstereotypic exemplar has been reported to reduce anti-Black implicit attitudes (Columb & Plant, 2011, 2016). However, after examining societal-level data from the Implicit Attitude Test (IAT) during the Obama era, and accounting for shifts in sample demographics over time, Schmidt and Nosek (2010) and Schmidt and Axt (2016) found that mean implicit and explicit attitudes did not change meaningfully during Obama’s campaign, nor over the length of his presidency. Given that such a seemingly potent exemplar could not be connected with shifts in aggregate attitudes, the authors suggested that racial attitudes may not be as malleable as previously thought. In the field of racial attitudes, implicit bias against Black people in particular appears tenacious. Anti-Black implicit bias has been found to emerge early in childhood (Baron & Banaji, 2006) and to exist on average across every age, gender, racial, and national group that has been studied, with the exception of Black people themselves, who tend to be closer to an egalitarian “no preference” implicit attitude when comparing Blacks and Whites (Nosek, Smyth, et al., 2007).

In contrast to the lack of evidence for any changes in aggregate racial attitudes across Obama’s presidency after controlling for demographics, a reduction in societal-level antigay attitudes was found for both implicit and explicit attitudes between February 2006 and August 2013 (Westgate et al., 2015). The authors characterized this period in terms of legal changes (e.g., recognition of same-sex marriage) and more favorable media representations of gay and lesbian people, and conjectured that reductions in antigay attitudes were due to these cultural changes. However, this period also included the mass lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights movement, which was arguably the primary driving force behind these legislative and cultural changes (Kowal, 2015). Furthermore, it is well documented that White Americans’ explicit attitudes toward racial desegregation and toward Blacks in general changed in a progressive direction around the time of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and early 1970s (Condran, 1979; Greeley & Sheatsley, 1971; Taylor, Sheatsley, & Greeley, 1978). This raises the question of whether mass social movements might be a more effective force for creating aggregate, societal-level attitude change than individual exemplars or lab-based interventions. In other words, given that lab studies targeting individual-level attitude change using a variety of interventions and high-status exemplars did not produce enduring or societal-level reductions in implicit bias, could social movements (and the cultural and media changes they produce) potentially contribute to such reductions in implicit bias?

Several theories of attitude change illuminate why social movements have the potential to drive societal-level changes in both implicit and explicit attitudes (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Petty, Briñol, & DeMarree, 2007; Rydell & McConnell, 2006). One prominent framework, the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model, posits that implicit attitude change can result from changes in the structure of associative evaluations or temporary changes in activation patterns of preexisting associations (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006, 2014). The APE argues that exposure to familiar exemplars like Obama may activate specific preexisting associations with Obama (e.g., powerful, accomplished), which temporarily influences associative evaluations of Blacks in general. However, because the exemplar is individually specific, its activation may not fundamentally alter one’s associative structure with Black people in general. In contrast, a social movement that repeatedly pairs Black people in general with positive words (“Black Lives Matter”), images, and traits (courageous, agentic) may systematically change the underlying valence of associations with Black people, thus causing more fundamental and lasting change on an aggregate, societal level. BLM may also change the social context in which evaluative associations are formed. For example, in contrast with a pervasive media and social narrative of Blacks as criminals, BLM has highlighted Black people as targets of racism and unlawful police brutality, who in turn are actively fighting for justice, which would appear to carry positive associations as well. In addition, BLM rallies, interviews, and media coverage have given Black people the opportunity to directly voice their opinions on racism and racial issues. This is potentially significant because listening to opinions expressed through speech seems to increase the likelihood that individuals will attribute humanlike qualities to those expressing the opinion—even if the opinion is not currently shared (Schroeder, Kardas, & Epley, 2017). Furthermore, the millions of individuals who attend BLM demonstrations or who come to politically identify with the movement may create new associations between themselves and Blacks; such associations with the self are argued to produce more positive evaluations of the attitude object (Walther & Trasselli, 2003). Furthermore, through participation in or identification with BLM there is the possibility of creating a common ingroup identity (e.g., as antiracists) that includes both Blacks and Whites, which evidence suggests can reduce racial bias (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2005).

In addition to changing implicit attitudes, an antiracist movement may transform explicit attitudes by catalyzing widespread political discussion, thus generating and spreading persuasive arguments about the value of Black lives or the virtue of struggling against racism. According to APE, generating such arguments and propositions for reasoning can initiate proactive top-down construction of new associative evaluations, which further changes the structure of implicit attitudes. Through such propositional mechanisms, changes in explicit racial attitudes can alter implicit racial attitudes. Conversely, changes in implicit associations can have bottom-up effects that modify explicit evaluations. In the context of an ongoing, real-world social movement like BLM, it is likely that both processes operate reciprocally, amplifying the potential of the movement to shift implicit and explicit racial attitudes. Finally, although systemic racism can often seem an intractable problem, a mass movement like BLM can raise hopes that something can actually be done to ameliorate this problem. Such an increased sense of efficacy to reduce racial inequality has been found to not only increase Whites’ engagement in antidiscriminatory action but to also be associated with more positive explicit intergroup attitudes toward Blacks (Stewart, Latu, Branscombe, & Denney, 2010). Of course, individuals’ political orientations may affect how they respond to processes related to social movements. Furthermore, it is possible that polarization of attitudes may occur between liberals and conservatives, or that conservatives might be more likely to undergo an attitudinal “backlash” to social movements in certain contexts (Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008), especially given the presence of countermovements such as All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. An interesting and important question in its own right, we also investigated whether observed attitude changes during BLM occurred among Americans of all political orientations, or just among those with certain orientations (e.g., liberals).

To investigate the possibility of a BLM effect on racial attitudes, we first delineated the overall period of time marked by the emergence, growth, and sustained activity of BLM (July 6, 2013-June 30, 2016). We hypothesized that the BLM period would entail an aggregate reduction in implicit and explicit preference for Whites over Blacks, compared with the preceding years during the Obama administration. We also hypothesized an ongoing, cumulative influence of BLM on attitudes that would be reflected in gradual change in aggregate attitudes over time during BLM. Furthermore, we expected that specific high points of BLM struggle within the overall BLM period would correspond to additional short-term decreases in pro-White/anti-Black bias. To test this hypothesis, we selected, a priori, empirically supported high points of BLM struggle and resulting media activity. Finally, we examined whether the magnitude of any observed attitude changes differed among liberals and conservatives. Of course, it is important to note that any relations found between BLM and societal-level attitude change is correlational in nature, and thus precludes causal conclusions. Nevertheless, examining attitudes during a predefined BLM period with specific high points of BLM struggle, specified a priori using historical, media, and social-media data, increases the likelihood that attitude changes corresponding to these periods are at least partially attributable to BLM.

Discussion Individually targeted lab-based interventions and exposure to high-status individual exemplars like Barack Obama have thus far proven ineffective in changing implicit racial attitudes, either on a long-term basis or on a societal level. In this context, antiracist mass social movements offer a potential alternative for reducing societal-level racial bias that has been virtually unexplored. The BLM movement in particular has collectively affirmed the value of Black lives, and could theoretically have influenced both implicit and explicit racial attitudes in the United States. This study investigated what impact, if any, this antiracist social movement may have had on Whites’ and Blacks’ attitudes in relation to these racial identities. We examined racial attitudes before and during BLM and its high points of struggle using 1,369,204 IAT sessions from 2009 to 2016. This was done to investigate the possible ongoing and cumulative influence of BLM on attitudes over time, as well as potentially more rapid, short-term impacts on attitudes associated with high points of movement activity. Converging evidence from the multiple analyses presented here suggests that pro-White implicit racial bias has decreased concurrent with BLM and its high points of struggle. Although effect sizes across analyses were very small (Sawilowsky, 2009), for the full sample, aggregate implicit attitudes were less pro-White during BLM than pre-BLM and became increasingly less pro-White over time during the BLM period. Furthermore, RDA indicated that these results were not due to an historical trend toward decreasing pro-White bias over the full study span. Rather, before shifting to a decreasing trend during the BLM movement, pro-White implicit bias was actually increasing during the years of the Obama administration prior to BLM. Implicit attitudes were less pro-White during four of the six periods of high BLM struggle in comparison with the preceding 30 days, with two periods showing no change in either direction. In addition to ruling out seasonal effects, the finding that implicit attitudes did not undergo short-term changes for arbitrary selected periods within BLM suggests that attitude changes during high points of BLM struggle were not the result of a general downward trend in pro-White bias during the BLM period. Moreover, participants of all political orientations (from strongly liberal to strongly conservative) displayed reductions in pro-White implicit and explicit bias, with the largest effects for the most liberal participants and the weakest effects for the most conservative participants. In contrast to implicit attitudes, evidence for changes in explicit racial attitudes in the full sample was more mixed. Explicit attitudes were slightly less pro-White during BLM than pre-BLM, but did not become meaningfully less pro-White over time during BLM. Explicit attitudes were less pro-White during two of six periods of high BLM struggle, with other periods showing no change in either direction. These seemingly weaker effects, however, appear to be due to the fact that Whites’ and Blacks’ explicit attitudes changed in opposite directions, obscuring these effects in the full sample. The attitude patterns evident in the full sample, while suggestive, are more accurately characterized as divergent patterns of attitude change among White and Black subgroups. Whites’ implicit attitudes were less pro-White during BLM than pre-BLM, became meaningfully less pro-White across BLM, and were less pro-White during four of six periods of high BLM struggle. In contrast, Blacks’ implicit attitudes showed relatively little difference between the pre-BLM and BLM periods, did not become meaningfully more pro-Black over time during the BLM period, and did not change during any periods of high BLM struggle. Thus, while multiple analyses provide evidence that Whites became less implicitly pro-White in relation to BLM, Blacks’ implicit attitudes did not appear to change. This suggests that the BLM period entailed a greater change in the implicit attitudes of Whites than Blacks. One of several potential explanations for this is that antiracist social movements like BLM may have an effect of moving all racial groups toward more egalitarian racial attitudes. Thus, because Blacks demonstrated little implicit bias prior to BLM (being close to “no preference”) and Whites exhibited a greater degree of implicit bias, the larger change among Whites may reflect a greater room for bias reduction. In terms of explicit attitudes, Whites and Blacks demonstrated generally opposite directions of change. Whites’ explicit attitudes were less pro-White during BLM than pre-BLM, became meaningfully less pro-White over time during BLM, and were less pro-White during two of six periods of high BLM struggle (other periods showed no change). Conversely, Blacks’ explicit attitudes were less pro-Black during BLM, became meaningfully less pro-Black across BLM, and showed no change during periods of high BLM struggle. At first glance, these appear to be opposing trends in Blacks’ and Whites’ explicit attitudes, but they can also be viewed as a mutual shift toward an egalitarian, no preference position. Such a shift in explicit attitudes could be considered consistent with the movement’s egalitarian emphasis. Though these results were not anticipated, several articles have argued that oppressed groups often express strong explicit ingroup preferences to counteract hostile outgroup attitudes, and these ingroup preferences are likely to weaken if societal attitudes become less hostile (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Livingston, 2002; Westgate et al., 2015). While this is post hoc speculation, one possibility is that decreasing bias on the part of Whites during BLM may have slightly lessened the need for Blacks (oppressed group) to maintain explicitly pro-Black preferences. In summary, while further research on such possibilities is needed, the shifts in attitudes for both Whites and Blacks are consistent with the prospect that social movements may move attitudes closer to an egalitarian position, unless those attitudes are already close to egalitarian to begin with. For Blacks, this means that implicit attitudes (which were initially close to no preference) showed little change during BLM, whereas explicit attitudes (which were solidly pro-Black) showed a much larger shift toward an egalitarian, no preference position. Thus, these results at least raise the possibility that antiracist social movements, rather than inevitably polarizing Whites and Blacks against each other, may instead be capable of moving both groups toward more egalitarian explicit racial attitudes. This study focused on the historically constructed racial groups (Blacks and Whites) that have been and continue to be central to the workings of racism in the United States. However, a secondary analysis for participants of races other than Black and White was conducted as a point of comparison. Results were consistently in the same direction as those for White participants (becoming less pro-White during BLM), but the effects were slightly weaker, falling between those of Whites and Blacks (though generally closer to Whites). This is perhaps understandable given a U.S. context in which races other than Blacks and Whites have often not been accorded status as “races” per se, but are conceptualized more along the lines of geography (e.g., Asian, Middle Eastern) or language (e.g., Hispanic) (Fields, 1990). In other words, with Whites and Blacks anchoring U.S. racial relations, changes in the racial preferences of other racial groups (for Whites relative to Blacks) may tend to fall somewhere in between the divergent patterns of Blacks and Whites. Given that empirical research exploring these relations is in its nascency, such hypotheses about the effects of antiracist movement in relation to the attitudes of various racial groups are certainly speculative. This study offers the first empirical evidence connecting a social movement to concurrent societal-level changes in implicit and explicit attitudes. Although the BLM-related effect sizes found across the present analyses are quite small, such effects across many individuals can represent shifts in attitudes with impacts on discrimination that are societally meaningful (Greenwald et al., 2015). These effects are potentially noteworthy given the tenacious persistence of racism in the United States and the society-wide scope of BLM. Moreover, unlike laboratory interventions, BLM was not designed for the express purpose of targeting implicit attitudes. By comparison, the effectiveness of the Civil Rights movement in radically changing attitudes on desegregation and other racial questions may derive in part from the success of the movement in winning tangible structural reforms in the form of sweeping legal changes (e.g., legal desegregation, voting rights). In contrast, BLM has not succeeded in winning such legal or structural reforms, which may be a factor in the very small size of the effects observed during the BLM period. In addition, the present study opens preliminary investigation into two potentially different types of attitude change that may be associated with social movements. The first type is an ongoing, cumulative influence of movements that may be reflected in gradual, aggregate attitude change over lengthy periods of time. The second type is a relatively concentrated burst of high movement activity that may lead to more rapid, short-term changes in aggregate attitudes. This study presented evidence that potentially supports both forms of attitude change in relation to BLM. While the present study predicted that attitude changes related to concentrated periods of high BLM activity would be precisely contemporaneous with those periods, this does not preclude the possibility of a time lag between intensive movement activity and corresponding attitude changes. Moreover, the time scale for attitude change in relation to a social movement may depend on the type of attitude in question (e.g., sexuality, gender, race) as well as social and historical factors bound up with specific movements within specific societies. It is likely that multiple forms and time scales of attitude change are operating during successful social movements, and this should be explored in future work. A major limitation on the generalizability of this study is that participants were self-selected. Although results are robust after controlling for key demographic changes from pre-BLM to BLM, the possibility that individuals with particular attitudes (e.g., more pro-Black) were more likely to take the IAT during the BLM period and its high points of struggle cannot be ruled out. In addition, many other social and political events were occurring around the time of BLM that could have played a role in the societal attitude shifts reported here, which cannot be ruled out by a correlational study such as the present one. Consequently, changes in racial attitudes that are concurrent with BLM and its high points of struggle cannot be taken as evidence that BLM caused these changes. We have made our data and analyses publicly available so that third variables that may account for these correlations between BLM and racial attitudes can be investigated. Nevertheless, the changes corresponding to the a priori selection of the overall BLM period and specific short-term periods of high BLM struggle—using a chronology of BLM combined with BLM media citation data—adds credibility to the notion that BLM may have contributed to observed attitude changes. In addition, the lack of attitude changes during arbitrarily selected short-term periods during BLM supports the hypothesized BLM-related effects of the prespecified periods of high struggle. Although difficult to achieve, future studies should attempt experimental manipulations of exposure to or participation in social struggle to directly examine these potential causal effects. In addition, direct participation in the BLM movement may have had a stronger impact on attitudes than mere exposure to BLM-related media coverage, which may be disentangled in future work. Although evidence suggests that Project Implicit participants show similar patterns of bias as those in nationally representative samples (Pinkston, 2015), another constraint on the generalizability of this study is that the sample was not nationally representative. In particular, the sample had proportionally more liberal participants than the national population, a concern because political ideology has the strongest effect on racial attitudes (other than race itself, for which we conducted subgroups analysis). In addition, the gender balance of the sample was particularly more heavily female than the national average. We attempted to address this issue by weighting our sample to be nationally representative on political ideology and gender, and found either no change or an increase in effect size of aggregate attitude changes from pre-BLM to BLM, suggesting that attitude changes during BLM are not attributable to a lack of national representativeness in the sample. Furthermore, participants of all political orientations showed decreased pro-White implicit and explicit bias, supporting the possibility that BLM has had a progressive effect across the political spectrum, with the greatest effects among liberals and the smallest effects among conservatives. The relation between BLM and racial attitudes studied here is potentially generalizable to connections between other biases (e.g., anti-LGBT biases) and the specific social movements fighting those biases (e.g., LGBT rights movement). There is, however, no empirical evidence to support such a hypothesis at present, as no similar studies have been published. Furthermore, generalizability may depend on the strength of a given social movement in relation to countervailing social movements, as well as the degree of legal reforms or structural changes the movement is able to win. In the case of BLM, the finding of decreased pro-White bias across political orientations may indicate that countermovements against BLM during the span of the study were not strong enough to change its overall effect, even among the most conservative participants. In other words, because “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” countermovements have been weaker in the streets as well as less resonant in social media and web trends, it suggests that countermovements might have dampened but not reversed the overall effects of BLM. While potentially surprising, there appears to be precedent for this finding in the efficacy of the American Civil Rights Movement to create widespread changes in societal-level explicit racial attitudes despite violent backlash and countermovements (e.g., Condran, 1979; Taylor et al., 1978). Taken as a whole, the findings here suggest the possibility that antiracist social movements may contribute to societal-level changes in implicit and explicit racial attitudes. Viewed through the lens of the APE framework, social movements have the potential to influence implicit and explicit attitudes through a variety of associational and propositional mechanisms, in addition to redefining ingroup identities (e.g., as antiracists of all races), and enhancing feelings of efficacy to collectively ameliorate racism. While very little work to date has addressed social movements in relation to implicit attitudes, Zerhouni, Rougier, and Muller (2016) found that municipal-level implicit attitudes predicted citywide participation in protest activity. This raises the possibility that social movements and aggregate attitude change could be mutually reinforcing. In one such scenario, social struggle may change attitudes, thereby promoting further protest activity, which in turn would further transform attitudes. Envisioned as part of such an ongoing process, the collective organization of social movements presents a potential societal-scale alternative to laboratory-based, individual attitude-change interventions. It is our hope that further research exploring the connection between social movements and societal-scale attitude change will help to evaluate these prospects.

Acknowledgements We thank Brian Nosek and the Nosek Lab for feedback on analysis, interpretation of the results, and preregistration, and Robert Moulder for his assistance with data analysis.

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