White Americans' preference for Black people in advertising has increased in the past 66 y: A meta-analysis.

This study investigates Black and White consumers' preferences for Black versus White people in United States advertising contexts over 66 y, from 1956 until 2022, a time in which the United States has experienced significant ethno-racial diversification. Examining Black and White consumers' reactions to visual advertising over more than half a century offers a unique and dynamic view of interracial preferences. Mass advertising reaches an audience of billions and can shape people's attitudes and behavior, emphasizing the relevance of clarifying the influence of race in advertising, how it has evolved over time, and how it may contribute to mitigating discrimination based on racial perceptions. A meta-analysis of extant experiments into the relationship between the depicted endorser's race (i.e., the model in a visual ad) and the reaction of Black and White viewers pertains to 332 effect sizes from 62 studies reported in 52 scientific papers, comprising 10,186 Black and White participants. Our results are anchored in a conceptual framework, including a comprehensive set of perceiver (viewer), target (endorser), social/societal context, and publication characteristics. Without accounting for temporal dynamics, the results indicate ingroup favoritism, such that White viewers prefer White models and Black viewers prefer Black models. But by controlling for the publication year, it is possible to observe a time-dependent trend: Historically, White consumers preferred endorsers of the same race, but this preference has significantly shifted toward Black endorsers in recent years. In contrast, the level of Black consumers' reactions to endorsers of the same race remains largely unchanged over time.

When the antidote is the poison: Investigating the relationship between people's social media usage and loneliness when face-to-face communication is restricted.

When governments mandated lockdowns to limit the spread of the coronavirus, the resulting reduction of face-to-face communication threatened many people's psychological well-being by fostering feelings of loneliness. Given social media's eponymous social nature, we study the relationship between people's social media usage and their loneliness during these times of physical social restrictions. We contrast literature highlighting the social value of social media with a competing logic based on the "internet paradox," according to which increased social media usage may paradoxically be associated with increasing, not decreasing, levels of loneliness. As the extant literature provides opposing correlational insights into the general relationship of social media usage and loneliness, we offer competing hypotheses and offer novel longitudinal insights into the phenomenon of interest. In the empirical context of Germany's initial lockdown, our research uses survey panel data from February 2020 (before the lockdown) and April 2020 (during the lockdown) to contribute longitudinal evidence to the matter. We find that more usage of social media in the studied lockdown setting is indeed associated with more, not less loneliness. Thus, our results suggest a "social media paradox" when physical social restrictions are mandated and caution social media users and policy makers to not consider social media as a valuable alternative for social interaction. A post-hoc analysis suggests that more communication via richer digital media which are available during physical lockdowns (e.g., video chats) softens the "social media paradox". Conclusively, this research provides deeper insights into the social value of social interactions via digital media during lockdowns and contributes novel insights into the relationship between social media and loneliness during such times when physical social interaction is heavily restricted.