A number of different theories have been proposed relating to the formation, development, and influence of implicit attitudes.
[2] Halo effects are an example of the empirical research used by Greenwald and Banaji in their chapter on implicit social cognition.
As an example, a 2004 study found that individuals who were primarily raised by their mothers showed a more positive implicit attitude towards women rather than men.
In 2002, Livingston et al. examined the effect of mainstream culture on one's implicit attitude towards their social group.
With that said, a strong cultural disadvantage (e.g., negative attitude) can effectively eliminate in-group favoritism when tested at the implicit level.
Olson and Fazio et al. suggested in 2004 that at an implicit level one's personal attitude can be influenced by the social or cultural norms that one perceives.
[1] That is, implicit attitudes are not believed to be stable representations of memory, rather they are constructed based on the type of available information in a given situation.
In Bassenoff and Sherman et al. (2000) they found that automatic negative attitudes about overweight individuals directly predicted how far participants choose to sit from a fat woman, who they were expected to interact with.
[16] As demonstrated by Dasgupta an Rivera et al. (2006), individuals who endorsed traditional beliefs about gender and sexuality were friendlier towards gay confederates verbally but showed negative non-verbal behavior, this suggested that this individuals were consciously over-correcting their behavior but their prejudice leaked out through automatic responses like blinking and eye contact.
[1] Although, research has shown that motivation and an opportunity to react carefully can affect how much implicit attitudes influence behavioral response.
Though these tests vary in administration, and content, the basis of each is to "allow investigators to capture attitudes that individuals are unwilling to report.
The following are brief descriptions about these measurements, which are most commonly used to assess implicit attitudes, and the empirical evidence that supports them.
In a series of tasks, participants sort words or images representing a target concept such as race (white/black) and stimuli with known positive/negative valence into two categories (usually indicated by right or left location on a computer screen).
faster categorization of dogs when paired with positive rather than negative words), which would indicate an implicit attitude towards that object.
An analysis from the Project Implicit database found that science-gender stereotypes are predictive of differences in gender related math and science performance across countries in an international sample.
[22] Implicit attitude also directly drives the use of information systems[23] and serves as a basis upon which use habit is formed.
Participants were then asked to complete a lexical decision task (LDT) to identify if target stimuli are words or a non-words.
[32] In practice, the GNAT appears similar to the Implicit Association Test in that participants are asked to categorize targets representing either a concept (such as race; ex.
Like the EAST, the GNAT has been used in populations who have been diagnosed with acute phobias to measure fear associations in addition to research on stereotypes and discrimination.
In the procedure, participants are first presented with a stimulus (usually an image or word), for either a brief visible period or subliminally, which is suspected to elicit a positive or negative attitude.
During these trials, the positive or negative affect in response to the priming image is misattributed or 'projected' onto the neutral stimulus such that it is rated as more or less pleasing than would be expected from solitary presentation.
For example, in 2005 Nosek found that there was more overlap in explicit and implicit measures when people rated Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola (low self presentation concern).
However, when they rated thin vs. fat people (high self presentation concern), the correlation (or overlap) of implicit and explicit measure decreased.
Strong attitudes are stable and not easily changed due to persuasion and can therefore help predict behaviors.
People's explicitly stated and implicitly tested attitudes are more likely to be in sync for trivial matters such as preference in a presidential election than for highly charged issues such as predispositions towards a certain race.
A prominent dual process theory specifying the relation between implicit and explicit attitudes is Gawronski and Bodenhausen's associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model.
[42] A central assumption of the APE model is that implicit and explicit evaluations are the product of two functionally distinct mental processes.
In addition to explaining the relation between implicit and explicit evaluations, the APE model accounts for diverging patterns of attitude change, including:[42]