In my blog last week I discussed how implicit stereotypes affect our behaviour. You may recall that implicit stereotypes are the stereotypes that are active without our knowledge. This week I will focus on implicit attitudes and how they affect our behaviour.
In a paper completed by Rudman (2004), the author discusses four ways that implicit attitudes are formed. First, Rudman explains that our early experiences tend to shape our implicit attitudes, and that newer or more recent experiences tend to shape our explicit attitudes. She goes on the explain an experiment that found smokers’ implicit attitudes tended to be aligned with their first experiences of smoking (negative), but that these participants claimed to have positive explicit views of smoking. Second, she explains how the amygdala is active during experiments measuring implicit attitudes, therefore implicit attitudes must have an affective component. She discusses how priming based on emotions can have an effect on implicit attitudes. Third, Rudman discusses cultural anomalies in implicit attitude studies. Many studies have found that minority groups often implicitly rate dominant groups as more positive, but rate their minority group more positively when asked explicitly. She writes that these findings can be explained using the early experiences, and affective theories previously provided. And finally, the cognitive consistency principle also causes implicit attitudes. This principle is based on the idea that if I am good, and I am a woman, then women must also be good. These four theories are very valuable for us to understand the formation of implicit attitudes.
A study completed by Knutson, DeTucci, and Grafman (2011) looked at implicit attitudes present in a participant with acquired prosopagnosia. The researchers were interested to know if implicit social biases could be activated in people with prosopagnosia, because they cannot recognize familiar faces. The participant was asked to categorize faces explicitly by race, gender and political party using the Implicit Associations Test. It was found that the participant was slower to catagorize black faces compared to white faces, and an overall effect was found for race and celebrity IATs. These researchers conclude that implicit attitudes may be retrieved by using pathways that bypass the fusiform gyri. This information is useful because it shows us that these attitudes can be activated using simple stimuli.
A study completed by Hahn, Judd, Hirsh, and Blair (2014) looked at the validity of the Implicit Association Test, and if it even measures unconscious attitudes. In this study, participants were asked to predict their results on the Implicit Association Test. This study found that participants were able to predict their results with great accuracy, but could explain that this was not necessarily how they felt explicitly. It should be noted that there was low correspondence between the results for the IAT compared to the participants’ explicit self-reported attitudes. It was found that the IAT does not necessarily measure unconscious attitudes, it may simply measure what is more socially acceptable or dominant.
The above research describes phenomena, in which cognitive information is activated. This information then has an effect on our behaviour, because as you can see, people may not be aware of this information. Whether or not you think these are unconscious attitudes, or simply information that has been encoded by association, you must agree that it has an effect on our behaviour.
References
Hahn, A., Judd, C. M., Hirsh, H. K., & Blair, I. V. (2014). Awareness of implicit attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 1369–1392. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0035028
Knutson, K. M., DeTucci, K. A., & Grafman, J. (2011). Implicit attitudes in prosopagnosia. Neuropsychologia, 49(7), 1851-1862. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.03.009
Rudman, L. (2004). Sources of Implicit Attitudes. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(2), 79-82. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.uleth.ca/stable/20182915
Exploration of Social Cognition 
Morris et al. suggest that along with an explicit cortical pathway of emotion, there is an implicit subcortical pathway as well. This subcortical pathway projects from the thalamus to the amygdala without connecting to the cortex. This pathway is for quick unrefined responses to a stimuli providing evidence for why we may be startled by a rubber hose thinking it is a snake. Once the slower, explicit pathway is able to reason the response to the stimulus, we are not scared of the rubber hose. This is what the IAT is measuring. Most likely everyone is going to choose the more socially acceptable answer, but it is the time it takes to choose that answer that is being tested. Taking more time would use the explicit pathway to reason what the acceptable answer is while quick responses show an implicit bias.
Morris, J., Ohman, A., and Dolan, R. (1999). A subcortical pathway to the right amygdala mediating “unseen” fear. PNAS. 96(4) 1680-1685.
LikeLike