Implicit social cognition: A brief (and gentle) introduction

Abstract

Over the past three decades, implicit social cognition research has flourished and has produced myriad novel insights into the automatic operation of social attitudes (evaluations) and stereotypes (beliefs). In this chapter, we provide an overview of what we regard to be significant and settled issues as well as the most pressing open questions that remain. Following a brief historical overview, we address (a) basic findings, such as mean levels of and demographic variation in implicit bias; (b) the relationship of implicit attitudes and stereotypes with other measures, including explicit attitudes and stereotypes and other forms of intergroup behavior; (c) the neural underpinnings of implicit bias; (d) questions of stability and change at different levels of analysis, including developmental stability, situational malleability, the prospect of long-term change within a single individual, and societal-level change; and (e) ongoing work and stimulating new developments, including aggregate-level analyses, the role of language, and questions about the representational format of implicit attitudes and stereotypes.

The project implicit international dataset: Measuring implicit and explicit social group attitudes and stereotypes across 34 countries (2009–2019)

“…PI:International is distinct from past research in providing an intersection of three key data features: (1) both direct and indirect measures of seven attitudes and stereotypes, (2) measured across multiple countries, and (3) measured continuously across 11 years. Given the known differences in attitudes and stereotypes across measurement types (e.g., Kurdi & Banaji, 2021 ), countries (e.g., Poushter & Kent, 2020 ), and time (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019 ), a dataset that enables researchers to comprehensively examine (or control for) the interaction of these features will offer unique benefits.…”

“…Implicit attitudes and stereotypes were measured using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al, 1998 ). The IAT remains the most common indirect measure of attitudes and stereotypes (Kurdi & Banaji, 2021 ). In the IAT, participants categorize two sets of category stimuli (e.g., White people and Black people) and two sets of attribute stimuli (e.g., “good” and “bad” on attitude tests), to the left or right using two response keys.…”

“…The first, and probably largest, set of studies includes those that investigate both explicit and implicit attitudes or stereotypes, but only in a single country sample and at a single moment in time (for a recent review, see Kurdi & Banaji, 2021 ). Such studies are typically focused on understanding the nature of individual- level attitudes and stereotypes, as discussed above, revealing insights into topics such as the unique relationships between implicit and explicit attitudes and behaviors (Kurdi et al, 2019 ) or the unique malleability of implicit and explicit attitudes (Blair, 2002 ; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006 ).…”

Bias and the Psychological Safety in Healthcare Teams

“…Implicit biases are unconscious beliefs, attitudes, feelings, or judgments and can be contrary to what we think ourselves (Kurdi & Banaji, 2021). Science demonstrates for us that we form unconscious bias from outside factors such as media messages, institutional policies, and family preferences (Edgoose et al, 2019).…”

Applying the questionnaire-based Implicit Association Test to measure depression

“…Many instruments were developed to measure automatic associations within this theoretical framework (e.g., Kurdi & Banaji, 2021). Among them, the classical Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al, 1998) is surely the most used and tested.…”