Black Lives Matter protests effective: Less bias

The murder of George Floyd in 2020 revived the Black Lives Matter movement, a large scale social movement that aims to highlight and reduce structural racism and inequality in the United States. The movement – and its coverage – strongly affected how White Americans thought about Black Americans, shows PhD researcher Max Primbs. 

In his research program, Primbs is investigated the influence of our social and cultural environment on our prejudices. 'Everyone has associations with certain groups of people', he explained. 'For example, white people tend to associate black people often with negative themes, such as crime or violence. Importantly, this type of prejudice does not necessarily reflect people's explicit opinions, nor is it necessarily an accurate reflection of reality. Instead, these associations and the resulting biases are influenced by how these groups are talked about in your environment: in your social circle, but also by politicians or in coverage on news channels or social media.'

Those prejudices can have far-reaching consequences. For example, Black Americans are disproportionately more likely to be shot by police in regions where white people are more prejudiced. Attempts at permanently reducing these biases have so far been futile and most interventions psychologists developed have no lasting effects. Primbs wanted to know if a natural change in our social and cultural environment – a large scale protest movement that shook the nation – would fare better at changing people's minds and making them less prejudiced? The BLM protests were a great opportunity to investigate this. 'The protests arose overnight and achieved tremendous scale immediately', Primbs said. 'The effect was quickly visible in the data: white Americans suddenly thought much less negatively about black Americans after George Floyd's death.'

Negative associations

The researchers used data from the Project Implicit database, combined with data from Google Trends, a protests database, and other sources. Because directly asking people what they think about minority groups often gives responses distorted by social desirability, they used a computerized task: In the task, people have to designate certain words as "good" or "bad" by pressing a button and use the same buttons to designate pictures of faces as "black" or "white”. Subjects usually are faster at categorizing a face as white, if “white” and “good” share a button compared to if “black” and “good” share a button. This means they have more positive associations with white people compared to Black people. 

The more negative association with black people diminished during the BLM protests, immediately after the onset of the protests. But Primbs also saw that attention to BLM waned somewhat again a few weeks after George Floyd's death. This could be seen, for example, in Google Trends: there were fewer and fewer searches for terms like Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. As attention to Black Lives Matter faded, bias began to increase again, almost reaching pre-BLM level again towards the end of 2020. 

Policy change

That the BLM protests had little effect in the long run has to do fading attention and a lack of long-term policy changes. ‘If you want lasting changing in attitudes, changes in policy seem paramount: they facilitate culture change very strongly. An example of that is a study by Dr. Eugene Ofosu showing that the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage accelerated the decrease in implicit bias towards gay and lesbian people.'

Donald Trump's role cannot be underestimated, according to Primbs. ‘He has normalized hateful rhetoric in the United States.’ Politicians have an important role model, according to the scholar, and can also introduce policies to promote equality. Primbs: 'It's always good if you can mobilize people in protests. That way you raise awareness around an issue, such as racism. But to bring about lasting change, you need new policies. Otherwise you are quickly back to square one as soon as the attention for the subject slackens again.'