The Complex Ring of Jingle Bells: The Association Between Christmas and Implicit Bias Towards Racial, Religious, and Sexual Minorities

Every year, billions of people celebrate Christmas all over the world – a religious event that is characterized by transient yet considerable changes in people’s social, cultural, and demographic environment. Drawing on the Bias of Crowds model, we investigated associations between Christmas and changes in implicit bias. In Study 1, we used Project Implicit data of more than 4 million White US Americans and found that Christmas was associated with changes in implicit bias towards Black people, Arab people, people with a darker skin tone, Judaism, Islam, and gay people. In Study 2, we conducted a high-powered pre-registered adversarial collaboration that tested whether Christmas affects implicit bias (n = 451) in a repeated-measures design and found that it was associated with changes in bias towards gay but not Arab people. Notably, this effect was in the opposite direction compared to the effect observed in Study 1. Together, these studies provide novel evidence for the role of the environment in shaping people’s implicit biases, while also highlighting problems associated with the widespread reliance on self-selected samples in research on situational models of bias.