Implicit and Explicit Illusory Correlation as a Function of Political Ideology

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that people who embrace different ideological orientations often show differences at the level of basic cognitive processes. For instance, conservatives (vs. liberals) display an automatic selective attention for negative (vs. positive) stimuli, and tend to more easily form illusory correlations between negative information and minority groups. In the present work, we further explored this latter effect by examining whether it only involves the formation of explicit attitudes or it extends to implicit attitudes. To this end, following the typical illusory correlation paradigm, participants were presented with members of two numerically different groups (majority and minority) each performing either a positive or negative behaviour. Negative behaviors were relatively infrequent, and the proportion of positive and negative behaviors within each group was the same. Next, explicit and implicit (i.e., IAT-measured) attitudes were assessed. Results showed that conservatives (vs. liberals) displayed stronger explicit as well as implicit illusory correlations effects, forming more negative attitudes toward the minority (vs. majority) group at both the explicit and implicit level.

The moral foundations of illusory correlation

“…In contrast with the results observed in previous studies [ 16 , 17 ], scores obtained in the political identity questionnaire did not correlate with illusory correlation effects. A potential explanation to these differences could be related to the way in which political ideology has been measured in the different studies.…”

“…In this sense, Castelli and Carraro [ 16 ] showed that, compared to liberals, conservatives tend to develop stronger illusory correlation effects when negative behaviors are the infrequent ones. These effects were later replicated by the same group, and new data showed that they could be observed, not only on explicit, but also on implicit attitudes towards the minority group [ 17 ].…”

Single- and Dual-Process Models of Biased Contingency Detection

“…In fact, the meta-analysis of these studies yielded an unusually large heterogeneity, Q (4) = 134.18, p < .001. Even the replication that Carraro et al (2014) reported in their general discussion yielded results notably distant from those of their main study, although both of them were statistically significant. This variability suggests that whether or not illusory correlations are observed in the IAT probably depends on a number of moderators that we still ignore.…”

“…However, the latest attempt to replicate this result using a similar methodology has failed to find any dissociation between explicit measures and the IAT. Using a very similar procedure to Ratliff and Nosek, Carraro, Negri, Castelli, and Pastore (2014) did find an illusory correlation on the IAT, showing that the original dissociation was either not reliable or, more likely, not generalizable to similar but not identical conditions. In a similar vein, a recent experiment conducted in our laboratory ( Vadillo, De Houwer, De Schryver, Ortega-Castro, & Matute, 2013 ) found an outcome-density effect using the IAT.…”

An Exploration of the Differential Effects of Parents' Authoritarianism Dimensions on Pre-school Children's Epistemic, Existential, and Relational Needs

“…Conservatives are also more cautious in exploring novel situations and give more weight to negative as compared to positive information in impression formation tasks (Shook and Fazio, 2009; Castelli and Carraro, 2011; Carraro et al, 2014). In addition, conservatives have been shown to display an automatic selective attention to negative stimuli (Carraro et al, 2011; for a review cf.…”