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Hidden vs. Visible Attitudes: Implicit and Explicit Evaluation
Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 2: Attitudes and BehaviorSection 2.4 · lesson 10 of 8512 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Two evaluations of one object, measured differently and predicting different behavior.
- Define implicit and explicit attitudes
- Describe the IAT, affective priming, and the AMP
- Compare the dual-attitude, MODE and APE accounts
- Evaluate the predictive validity of implicit measures
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Attitudes and Behavior
Hidden vs. Visible Attitudes
Ask someone what they think, and you get an answer. For most of the twentieth century, that answer was treated as the attitude. Then, in the mid-nineteen nineties, new methods complicated the picture badly. It turned out one person can hold two evaluations of the same thing. One deliberate and reportable. One automatic, and often different. This section covers what implicit means, and how it gets measured. It covers the three accounts of how the two can coexist. And it asks the practical question: which one predicts behavior? The answer turns out to depend on what kind of behavior you mean.
What Changed
For a Century, the Questionnaire Was the Attitude
Start with what the field looked like before the change. The attitude a person reported on a questionnaire simply was the attitude. Likert scales, semantic differentials, Thurstone-style instruments. And here is a phrase worth noticing: theorizing followed the technology. What we could measure shaped what we thought an attitude was. By the mid-nineteen nineties, methodological innovations changed that. They revealed something the field had only partially anticipated. The same person can hold two evaluations of the same object. And the two predict different kinds of behavior, under different conditions. Which means neither one is redundant, and you cannot drop either. This reshaped applied research, most prominently on prejudice. But also on consumer behavior, on addiction, and on political cognition.
Definitions
Introspectively Unidentified
Greenwald and Banaji gave the influential definition, in nineteen ninety-five. An implicit attitude is an introspectively unidentified trace of past experience. Or an inaccurately identified one. It mediates favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects. That phrase, introspectively unidentified, is doing all the work. Implicit attitudes are not necessarily unconscious in the strong Freudian sense. The person may simply be unaware of the evaluation. Or unable to report it accurately. Or unwilling to. Three different failures, and only the first is really about the unconscious. Implicit attitudes activate rapidly and automatically when the object appears. And overriding them requires cognitive resources. Explicit attitudes are the deliberate, reflective evaluations you endorse on reflection. They are shaped by the same experiences that build the implicit ones. But they are also subject to motivated revision. By social desirability, by beliefs about what you ought to feel, and by self-inference.
Measurement I
The Implicit Association Test
Three measurement traditions dominate. Start with the famous one. The Implicit Association Test, from Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz in nineteen ninety-eight. It is a sorting task, run under speed pressure. Participants pair target categories with attribute words. For example, Black and White faces, paired with the words good and bad. The measure is not accuracy. It is reaction time. Specifically, the difference between congruent and incongruent pairings. That difference yields the D-score, a standardized index of implicit evaluation. Psychometrically, the IAT has the highest internal consistency of the three. It is also sensitive to procedural variations, which is a real limitation.
Measurement II
Priming, Misattribution, and the Trade-Offs
The second tradition is affective priming, from Fazio and colleagues. The attitude object appears briefly as a prime. Then a word appears, and participants classify it as pleasant or unpleasant. Faster classification of pleasant words after a target indicates a positive attitude. The third is the Affect Misattribution Procedure, from Payne and colleagues in two thousand and five. The target is followed by an ambiguous Chinese ideograph. Participants rate the ideograph, not the target. And the affect the target produced gets misattributed to that rating. Each measure has a different weakness, which is the practical point. Priming maps most directly onto the theoretical construct of automatic activation. But it is noisier than the alternatives. The AMP is robust and easy to administer. But it is vulnerable to intentional control under some instructions. So best practice uses multiple measures whenever that is feasible.
Project Implicit
What Tens of Millions of Tests Showed
Since nineteen ninety-eight, Project Implicit has collected data at extraordinary scale. Tens of millions of IAT responses. On race, gender, age, sexuality, weight, religion, and dozens of other categories. Aggregate analyses reveal three robust patterns. First, implicit and explicit attitudes do correlate, but only modestly. The median correlation sits at about point two five. Second, implicit attitudes are widespread. And they are present in members of stigmatized groups themselves. Sit with that one, because it constrains what an implicit score can mean. If the bias shows up in the targeted group, it is not simply personal animus. Third, implicit prejudice has declined more slowly than explicit prejudice. Over the last two decades, with sexuality and race biases moving fastest toward neutrality.
Account 1 And 2
Two Attitudes, or One Decided by Conditions?
So if the two evaluations diverge, how are they stored? Three accounts dominate. The dual-attitude model comes from Wilson, Lindsey and Schooler, in two thousand. When an old attitude is updated by reflection or persuasion, the new one is stored alongside. Alongside, not instead of. The old attitude is still there. It continues to be activated automatically. The new one is retrieved when resources permit and motivation favors it. That model makes a sharp prediction about who diverges most. Someone who consciously repudiated an attitude they were raised with. Rejected childhood prejudices should show the widest gap of anyone. The MODE model, from Fazio in nineteen ninety, asks a different question. Motivation and Opportunity as Determinants is what the acronym stands for. Which attitude drives behavior depends on motivation to deliberate. And on opportunity, meaning the time and cognitive resources to do so. When both are low, the chronically accessible implicit attitude wins. When both are high, deliberate evaluation can override automatic activation.
Account 3
The Associative-Propositional Evaluation Model
The third account is the most fully specified, and the most useful. Gawronski and Bodenhausen published the APE model in two thousand and six. APE stands for associative-propositional evaluation. It distinguishes the two processes by representation type, not by speed. Associative processes generate spontaneous affective reactions. They work from stored co-activations, and they are what implicit measures pick up. Propositional processes do something different. They evaluate the validity of those affective reactions. They check them against the other propositions the person endorses. And that is what produces the explicit attitude. So divergence arises when propositional reasoning rejects an associative reaction. I feel uneasy around this group, but I know that feeling is unjustified. That framing explains something the other accounts struggle with. How two systems can share identical experiential inputs and still disagree.
Does It Predict?
Predictive Validity, and Where It Holds
Now the question that decides whether any of this is useful. Do implicit attitudes predict behavior over and above explicit ones? Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann and Banaji answered it in two thousand and nine. Their meta-analysis covered one hundred and eighty-four IAT studies. Average implicit-behavior correlations came out at about point two seven. But the average conceals a pattern, and the pattern is the finding. Implicit measures outperformed explicit ones in socially sensitive domains. Race, intergroup behavior, stigmatized health behaviors. Exactly the places where explicit reports are constrained by self-presentation. In non-sensitive domains the ranking reverses. For brand preferences and food choices, explicit measures match or beat implicit ones. Kurdi and colleagues published an update in twenty nineteen. It refined those estimates downward and emphasized heterogeneity. Heterogeneity across measures, and across behaviors. One condition unifies the whole pattern, though. Implicit measures predict best when the behavior itself is spontaneous.
Side By Side
Six Properties, Two Systems
Six properties separate the two systems cleanly. Activation is deliberate for explicit attitudes, automatic for implicit ones. Access to awareness is direct and reportable, versus indirect and often unrecognized. Measurement is self-report scales, versus reaction-time and misattribution tasks. Speed of formation is where the contrast is sharpest. An explicit attitude is updatable in a single trial. An implicit one is slow and cumulative. That is why persuasion and de-biasing are genuinely different projects. Explicit attitudes predict behavior under reflection and motivation. Implicit ones predict under spontaneity, time pressure, and low control. And they fail differently. Explicit measures are susceptible to demand and social desirability. Implicit measures are susceptible to stereotype activation and context cues.
Interpretation
What Does an IAT Score Actually Mean?
Here is a case that forces you to interpret rather than just measure. Someone's IAT reveals an implicit preference for in-group faces. Their explicit attitude is unequivocally egalitarian. Three interpretations are live, and they are not equivalent. The first is the demand reading. They hold the bias privately and conceal it. The second is the APE reading. They reject the bias propositionally, but still carry the residual association. An association acquired from cultural learning, not from personal conviction. The third is the extra-personal reading. The test measures exposure to cultural associations, not personal evaluation. You cannot skip this question, because the readings imply different interventions. Deciding which you hold, and what evidence would move you, is the analytic work.
Consolidate
One of the Field's Most Consequential Innovations
The implicit-explicit distinction is one of the field's most consequential innovations. Implicit attitudes are automatically activated traces of past experience. Measured indirectly, through the IAT, through priming, and through the AMP. Explicit attitudes are deliberate, reportable evaluations. The two correlate only modestly. And they predict different behaviors under different conditions. Explicit measures dominate when reflection is available and the behavior is deliberated. Implicit measures dominate when behavior is rapid, or self-presentation is at stake. Or when cognitive resources are simply limited. The dual-attitude, MODE and APE accounts explain the divergence in complementary ways. Here is the design lesson to carry forward. Choosing a measure is choosing a theory of the behavior you expect. Ask whether the act you care about is deliberated or spontaneous. Then pick.
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