Forming implicit and explicit attitudes toward individuals: Social group association cues.

Abstract

The authors explored how social group cues (e.g., obesity, physical attractiveness) strongly associated with valence affect the formation of attitudes toward individuals. Although explicit attitude formation has been examined in much past research (e.g., S. T. Fiske & S. L. Neuberg, 1990), in the current work, the authors considered how implicit as well as explicit attitudes toward individuals are influenced by these cues. On the basis of a systems of evaluation perspective (e.g., R. J. Rydell & A. R. McConnell, 2006; R. J. Rydell, A. R. McConnell, D. M. Mackie, & L. M. Strain, 2006), the authors anticipated and found that social group cues had a strong impact on implicit attitude formation in all cases and on explicit attitude formation when behavioral information about the target was ambiguous. These findings obtained for cues related to obesity (Experiments 1 and 4) and physical attractiveness (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, parallel findings were observed for race, and participants holding greater implicit racial prejudice against African Americans formed more negative implicit attitudes toward a novel African American target person than did participants with less implicit racial prejudice. Implications for research on attitudes, impression formation, and stigma are discussed.

The Dominance of Associative Theorizing in Implicit Attitude Research: Propositional and Behavioral Alternatives

“…According to this definition, an evaluation imputes an association between the attitude object and positive or negative valence that determines whether the individual responds in a favorable or unfavorable manner. Attitudes can be formed toward a diverse range of stimuli, from the self (e.g., Koole, Dijksterhuis, & Van Knippenberg, 2001;Pelham, Mirenberg, & Jones, 2002) to other individuals (McConnell, Rydell, Strain, & Mackie, 2008), social groups (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami, & gaertner, 2002), behaviors (Sherman, Rose, Koch, Presson, & Chassin, 2003), abstract psychological concepts (e.g., nationality; Devos & Banaji, 2005), and events (Esses, Dovidio, & Hodson, 2002). 1 …”

The behavioural response of the professional buyer on social cues from the vendor and how to measure it

“…Buyers probably differ in their vulnerability regarding social cues, just as people differ in the strength of their BIS or BAS and therefore in their response to incentives versus threats (Pickett et al, 2004;McConnell et al, 2008;Sutton and Davidson, 1997;Elliot and Thrash, 2002). Resting patterns of frontal EEG asymmetry have trait-like properties, creating individual different emotional responses (Davidson and Fox, 1989).…”

“…Although it has been acknowledged that buyers' emotional state influences their response to suppliers, it has been difficult to make those effects concrete (Sheth, 1973;Andersen and Kumar, 2006). There is a need to investigate these effects not only based on explicit attitudes but also on implicit ones (McConnell et al, 2008). This paper's suggestion to use neuroscientific research techniques alongside existing techniques helps to measure the effects of these implicit attitudes.…”

“…The inferences people make based on social cues are reflected in explicit attitudes -of which people are consciously aware and which can be expressed in verbal reports -and specifically in implicit attitudes -of which people are unaware and which are therefore more difficult to observe (McConnell et al, 2008). For example, negative subliminal primes, or masked stimuli can result in negative implicit attitudes but nonnegative explicit attitudes (Rydell et al, 2006).…”

“…As the verbal message of the other does not always reveal somebody's intentions, people rely on social cues which they can recognise rapidly as they are innately prepared to do so (Gobbini et al, 2013;Adams and Kveraga, 2015). In some cases, content might even be largely irrelevant, and social cues predominate (McConnell et al, 2008).…”