Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes.

Abstract

Social behavior is ordinarily treated as being under conscious (if not always thoughtful) control. However, considerable evidence now supports the view that social behavior often operates in an implicit or unconscious fashion. The identifying feature of implicit cognition is that past experience influences judgment in a fashion not introspectively known by the actor. The present conclusionthat attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes have important implicit modes of operation-extends both the construct validity and predictive usefulness of these major theoretical constructs of social psychology. Methodologically, this review calls for increased use of indirect measures-which are imperative in studies of implicit cognition. The theorized ordinariness of implicit stereotyping is consistent with recent findings of discrimination by people who explicitly disavow prejudice. The finding that implicit cognitive effects are often reduced by focusing judges' attention on their judgment task provides a basis for evaluating applications (such as affirmative action) aimed at reducing such unintended discrimination.Long before they became central to other areas of psychological theory, concepts of cognitive mediation dominated the analysis of social behavior. The constructs on which this article focuses achieved early prominence in social psychological theory with formulations that were partly (attitude) or entirely (stereotype) cognitive. By the 1930s, Allport (1935) had declared attitude to be social psychology's "most distinctive and indispensable concept" (p. 798), Thurstone (1931;Thurstone & Chave, 1929) had developed quantitatively sophisticated methods for attitude measurement, and Braly (1933, 1935) had introduced a method that is still in use to investigate stereotypes. Self-esteem, an attitudinal construct to which this article gives separate treatment because of its prominence in recent research, also has a long-established history (e.g., James, 1890; see overview in Wylie, 1974Wylie, , 1979.Through much of the period since the 1930s, most social psychologists have assumed that attitudes, and to a lesser extent stereotypes, operate in a conscious mode. This widespread assumption of conscious operation is most evident in the nearuniversal practice of operationalizing attitudes (including selfesteem) and stereotypes with direct (instructed self-report) measures. The pervasiveness of direct measurement for attitudes and stereotypes was documented by Greenwald (1990) and by Banaji and Greenwald (1994) and is further reviewed below. In contrast, this article describes an indirect, unconscious, or implicit mode of operation for attitudes and stereotypes. 1 Anthony G. Greenwald, Department of Psychology, University of Washington; Mahzarin R. Banaji, Department of Psychology, Yale University.Preparation of this report as well as conduct of some of the research reported in it were supported by National Science Foundation Grants DBC-9205890 and DBC-9120987 and by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH-41328. We thank...

Implicit and explicit self-esteem discrepancies in people with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures

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Lost in dissociation: The main paradigms in unconscious cognition

“…On the contrary, the activation of attitudes and stereotypes, though clearly fast and effortless, shows too large an inter-subject variability to be seen as merely automatic (e.g., Devine & Sharp, 2009 In effect, what an abundance of studies has reported (see, e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;Payne & Gawronski, 2010) is that these higher thought processes are often unconscious, but this does not allow us to speak straightforwardly of automatisms (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2010). Even when automaticity does appear to be allied with unconscious processing, it is so in more than one way or degree (Bargh, 1989;.…”

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