Implicit Attitudes and Awareness

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Individual Differences, 2022

Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2013

Performance on implicit attitude measures is influenced both by the nature of activated evaluative associations and by people's ability to regulate those associations as they respond. One consequence is that identical implicit attitude scores may conceal different underlying processes. This study demonstrated this phenomenon and also shed light on the nature of age differences in antiaging bias on implicit attitude measures. Although younger and older participants demonstrated equivalent levels of antiaging bias on an Implicit Association Test (IAT), application of the Quad model showed that antiold associations were less activated among older than younger adults, but that older adults were less able to overcome these associations in performing the task. Thus, the lack of age differences in IAT performance concealed differences in both underlying evaluative associations and the ability to control those associations. These findings have important implications for the measurement and interpretation of implicit attitudes.

Should we understand implicit attitudes on the model of belief? I argue that implicit attitudes are (probably) members of a different psychological kind altogether, because they seem to be insensitive to the logical form of an agent’s thoughts and perceptions. A state is sensitive to logical form only if it is sensitive to the logical constituents of the content of other states (e.g., operators like negation and conditional). I explain sensitivity to logical form and argue that it is a necessary condition for belief. I appeal to two areas of research that seem to show that implicit attitudes fail spectacularly to satisfy this condition—although persistent gaps in the empirical literature leave matters inconclusive. I sketch an alternative account, according to which implicit attitudes are sensitive merely to spatiotemporal relations in thought and perception, i.e., the spatial and temporal orders in which people think, see, or hear things.

2017

Address for Correspondence: Dr. Leman Korkmaz, Başkent University, Faculty of Science and Letters, Department of Psychology, Bağlica Campus 06810 Ankara E-mail: [email protected] In this review, the aim is to familiarize readers to the concepts of implicit attitudes and implicit measures. It is also intended to speculate about the multidimensional expressions of implicit attitudes evaluated through different implicit measures. In the following parts, attitude as a concept will be discussed by emphasizing the differentiation of explicit and implicit attitudes as theoretical concepts. Subsequently, implicit measures will be introduced.

… Journal of Social …, 2007

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2013

This chapter was originally published in the Book Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 47 published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author's institution, for noncommercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who know you, and providing a copy to your institution's administrator.

Philosophical Psychology, 2016

In social psychology, the concept of implicit attitudes has given rise to ongoing discussions that are rather philosophical. The aim of this paper is to discuss the status of implicit prejudices from a philosophical point of view. Since implicit prejudices are a special case of implicit attitudes, the discussion will be framed by a short discussion of the most central aspects concerning implicit attitudes and indirect measures. In particular, the ontological conclusions that are implied by different conceptions of implicit attitudes will be scrutinized. The main question to be discussed involves whether implicit prejudices are mental states at all, or whether they are (despite the label ‘implicit mental states’) rather dispositions to behave in a certain way. This question will be discussed against the background of principles for belief (and mental state) ascription, which requires ascribed mental states to fulfill some specific explanatory role. We defend a conception of implicit prejudices that does not assume them to be mental states.

1995

Social behavior is ordinarily treated as being under conscious (if not always thoughtful) control. However, considerable evidence now supports the view that social behavior often operates in an implicit or unconscious fashion. The identifying feature of implicit cognition is that past experience influences judgment in a fashion not introspectively known by the actor. The present conclusionthat attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes have important implicit modes of operation-extends both the construct validity and predictive usefulness of these major theoretical constructs of social psychology. Methodologically, this review calls for increased use of indirect measures-which are imperative in studies of implicit cognition. The theorized ordinariness of implicit stereotyping is consistent with recent findings of discrimination by people who explicitly disavow prejudice. The finding that implicit cognitive effects are often reduced by focusing judges' attention on their judgment task provides a basis for evaluating applications (such as affirmative action) aimed at reducing such unintended discrimination.

Noûs, 2014

Implicit attitudes are mental states that appear sometimes to cause agents to act in ways that conflict with their considered beliefs. Implicit attitudes are usually held to be mere associations between representations. Recently, however, some philosophers have suggested that they are, or are very like, ordinary beliefs: they are apt to feature in properly inferential processing. This claim is important, in part because there is good reason to think that the vocabulary in which we make moral assessments of ourselves and of others is keyed to folk psychological concepts, like 'belief', and not to concepts that feature only in scientific psychology: if implicit attitudes are beliefs there is a prima facie case for thinking that they can serve as the basis for particular kinds of moral assessment. In this paper I argue that while implicit attitudes have propositional structure, their sensitivity and responsiveness to other mental representations is too patchy and fragmented for them to properly be considered beliefs. Instead, they are a sui generis kind of mental state, a state I dub patchy endorsements.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2012

We hypothesize that while evaluative priming involves proprioceptive cues, the IAT is representational due to its structural features and the specific algorithm upon which the IAT-effect rests. As predicted, evaluative priming is shown to rely on differential facial muscle activity while the IAT as a measurement instrument is not influenced by proprioceptive information. Evaluative priming does not yield differential responsiveness for congruent and incongruent trials when facial muscle activity is inhibited whereas the IAT-effect is shown to be impervious to such inhibition. Implications for the underlying mechanisms of implicit measures are discussed.