Implicit psychologists' estimates of attitude‐behaviour consistencies

Abstract

Implicit psychologists' estimates of attitude-behaviour consistenciesIntuitive or commonsense psychological theories are becoming increasingly popular as challenges and touchstones of scientific psychological reasoning (Schneewind, 1982; Semin, Rosch, Krolage and Chassein, 1981;Wish and Kaplan, 1977). Stated in terms of Wegner and Vallacher's conception of implicit psychology, 'psychological theory and research is an extension of concerns held by the average individual' (Wegner and Vallacher, 1977, cf. also Furnham andHenderson, 1983).In a study allowing direct comparisons between implicit and explicit personality theories, Semin et al. (1981) investigated whether naive judges are able to reproduce the scale structures of scientific personality inventories. Subjects were presented the scale labels of two widely used personality inventories and were then asked to categorize the complete item pool under these labels. The results show that naive subjects not only correctly identify the items belonging to each of the scales but also reproduce the interscale correlational structure of the inventories. From their findings, the authors conclude that scientific or explicit theories of personality as well as their corresponding measurement devices may be conceived of as derivations and explications of generally accepted commonsense definitions of personality concepts.Given this close relation between 'implicit' and 'explicit' formulations of psychological theories, any attempt at scientific analysis is confronted with the