Disentangling effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests on implicit anti-Black bias

Abstract

Terror Management Theory (TMT) holds that mortal threats bolster people's desire to support their worldviews, which may contribute to increased outgroup bias. In 2020, two events likely increased mortality salience and death anxiety: COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that followed George Floyd's murder. We used Project Implicit data to investigate their impact on implicit anti-Black bias, controlling for demographic variables. Study 1 (N = 82,639) found a decrease in anti-Black bias from April 1–May 20, 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, indicating that increased mortality salience amid the pandemic failed to increase anti-Black bias. Study 2 (N = 96,957) examined anti-Black bias and death anxiety across two seven-week periods prior to (April 1–May 20, 2020) and during the BLM protests (May 27–July 15, 2020). Death anxiety increased during the protests, while anti-Black bias decreased. Conservatives showed no link between death anxiety and anti-Black bias, yet showed a decrease in bias once the protests began. Liberals showed the TMT-predicted relation between death anxiety and increased bias, however this relation weakened during the protests. Notably, these attitude changes in the context of a mass social movement differ from predominant conservative shift and worldview defense patterns in prior work on attitude change amid social crisis. Collectively, our results failed to link mortality salience with outgroup bias but suggest a role for other factors including social movements, intergroup empathy, and social solidarity in reducing bias.