The Four Deadly Sins of Implicit Attitude Research

Abstract

In this article, we describe four theoretical and methodological problems that have impeded implicit attitude research and the popular understanding of its findings. The problems all revolve around assumptions made about the relationships among measures (indirect vs. versus direct), constructs (implicit vs. explicit attitudes), cognitive processes (e.g., associative vs. propositional), and features of processing (automatic vs. controlled). These assumptions have confused our understandings of exactly what we are measuring, the processes that produce implicit evaluations, the meaning of differences in implicit evaluations across people and contexts, the meaning of changes in implicit evaluations in response to intervention, and how implicit evaluations predict behavior. We describe formal modeling as one means to address these problems, and provide illustrative examples. Clarifying these issues has important implications for our understanding of who has particular implicit evaluations and why, when those evaluations are likely to be particularly problematic, how we might best try to change them, and what interventions are best suited to minimize the effects of implicit evaluations on behavior.

Age Specificity in Explicit and Implicit Endorsement of Prescriptive Age Stereotypes

“…Standard indirect measures that aim to assess associations (e.g., Affective Priming, Fazio et al, 1995 ; and the IAT, Greenwald et al, 1998 ), have recently been criticized for their lack of internal and predictive validity (e.g., Meissner et al, 2019 ; Corneille and Hütter, 2020 ; Meissner and Rothermund, in press ; Rothermund et al, 2020 ; Sherman and Klein, 2021 ). In addition to that, researchers have called attention to a further limitation of the most established standard indirect measures.…”

Persuasive communication systems: a machine learning approach to predict the effect of linguistic styles and persuasion techniques

“…In the survey we asked participants to complete a lengthy questionnaire about their psychological and demographic information. Some studies (Meissner et al, 2019;Sherman and Klein, 2021) have argued that self-reported attitudes and values are often in conflict with people's actual behaviour.…”

“…In the survey we asked participants to complete a lengthy questionnaire about their psychological and demographic information. Some studies (Meissner et al , 2019; Sherman and Klein, 2021) have argued that self-reported attitudes and values are often in conflict with people’s actual behaviour. Stephens-Davidowitz and Pinker (2017) suggested researchers beware of the social desirability bias - as people wish to look good (even though most surveys are anonymous) survey participants tend to inaccurately report behaviours and thoughts.…”

Endorsement and embodiment of cautiousness-related age stereotypes

“…One possible explanation for the low predictive validity of implicit measures of age stereotypes is that these measures typically aim at assessing simple associations between the category “old” and evaluative attributes. These measures of associations, however, are notoriously unreliable and ambiguous with regard to their interpretation ( Meissner et al, 2019 ; Rothermund et al, 2020 ; Sherman and Klein, 2021 ). On the one hand, associations do not have a clear meaning ( cf.…”