How “American” is Barack Obama? The Role of National Identity in a Historic Bid for the White House

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential election, we examined the extent to which the American identity was implicitly and explicitly associated with Barack Obama compared to Tony Blair (Study 1), Hillary Clinton (Study 2), and John McCain (Studies 3 and 4). When conscious control was relatively limited and targets were categorized based on race, the American identity was less strongly associated with Obama than with the other candidates. This effect was stronger than when the candidates were categorized based on their personal identity (Studies 1–4), gender (Study 2), political affiliation (Study 3), or age (Study 4). In addition, the extent to which candidates were differentiated in terms of implicit and explicit associations with the American identity predicted the relative willingness to actively support them.

What motivates a conspiracy theory? Birther beliefs, partisanship, liberal-conservative ideology, and anti-Black attitudes

“…Recent evidence from psychology provides some reason to expect that anti-Black attitudes may be more directly associated with perceptions that President Obama is un-American. In particular, many White Americans appear to view Whiteness as central to American identity (Devos and Banaji, 2005;Devos and Ma, 2012), and this schema appears to be predominant among those who hold negative views of nonWhites (Yogeeswaran and Dasgupta, 2010). Individuals associating Whiteness and American identify might therefore be more prone to accepting a foreign birthplace for Mr. Obama when confronted with circulating claims that he was born in Kenya or perhaps elsewhere.…”

Conceptions of national identity in a globalised world: Antecedents and consequences

“…Across several studies, data revealed that the extent to which Obama was implicitly perceived to be American (relative to Clinton, McCain, and Blair) predicted increased willingness to vote for him and donate to his campaign. Similarly, the extent to which Obama was explicitly perceived to be American relative to others predicted greater willingness to vote for Obama and donate to his campaign (Devos & Ma, 2013).…”

Every Heart Beats True, for the Red, White, and Blue: National Identity Predicts Voter Support

“…In particular, we manipulated the labels used to categorize the candidates by either asking participants to categorize stimuli based on personal identity labels (“Barack Obama” and “Mitt Romney”) or racial identity labels (“Black” and “White”). This manipulation has been shown to effectively focus participants’ attention on specific aspects of a target's identity (Devos & Ma, , ; Mitchell, Nosek, & Banaji, ). In line with previous research, we predicted that the tendency to view Obama as more American than Romney and like Obama more than Romney when the focus is on the candidates’ personal identities (see Study 1) would be reduced when the candidates’ racial identities were made salient .…”