This study tested the hypothesis that media exposure to Barack Obama leads to better performance on academic tasks for some African-American students, termed the Obama effect. Past research showed mixed results on whether there is an Obama effect. According to assimilation and contrast frameworks and the Self-Evaluation Maintenance model, Obama may have a positive impact on some students, while having a negative impact on others. In a pilot study, students either watched a short video of Obama or George W. Bush, then did an anagram task that measured academic performance. Among students with past low academic achievement, Obama produced greater performance compared to Bush. Conversely, for high achievers Obama elicited worse performance than Bush, or a reverse Obama effect. In a second study, the impact of Obama was compared to a no-video control. The Obama effect was replicated for those who were past low achievers, but the reverse Obama effect was not replicated, suggesting that the Bush video may have contributed to the effect in the pilot.

Research on self-construals suggests that priming a personal self-construal will lead participants to think of themselves as individuals, while priming a social self-construal will lead participants to think of themselves based on their group memberships. In the second study, the Obama video versus no video condition was crossed with a manipulation with a personal versus social self-construal prime manipulation. When presented with a successful person from the social in-group, such as Obama, the self-construal framework predicts that activation with the individual self will lead to worse performance due to comparison with the successful other, but if the social self is activated, this will lead to better performance due to the shared group membership. Findings failed to support the self-construal framework, among those who saw the Obama video and who regularly compare themselves with Obama, activation of a personal self-construal led to better performance than activation of the social self. Together these findings suggest that not every African-American student experiences the Obama effect, but that certain individual differences and circumstances make it more likely that Obama will have a positive impact.