Implicit–Explicit Relations

Mental process and mental experience are not the same thing. The former is the operation of the mind; the latter is the subjective life that emerges from that operation. In social evaluation, implicit and explicit attitudes express this distinction. Although it is clear that they are not the same, how they differ is not. Across content domains, implicit and explicit attitude measures show substantial variability in the strength of correspondence, ranging from near zero to strongly positive. Variation in controllability, intentionality, awareness, or efficiency is thought to differentiate implicit and explicit attitudes. Dual-process theories and empirical evidence for moderating influences of implicit–explicit attitude relations provide a framework for comprehending relations between the operation and the experience of the mind. KEYWORDS—implicit–explicit; attitudes; automaticity; Implicit Association Test; consciousness Subjective experience is a palpable, compelling, and poor account of mental operations. Introspection is an act of selfassessment, looking inward for answers to important questions: Who am I? Why did I do that? An enduring realization of modern psychology is that such introspection has limited access to mental processes (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Rather, humans’ conscious experience operates like an intrepid journalist making inferences about a corporation through observable actions and obscured reports from insiders. It is easy for people to accept that some mental processes governing proprioception (i.e., balance), perception, and language comprehension operate nonconsciously. Somewhat harder to accept is the notion that memory processes have nonconscious components. And, for some people, it seems silly to think of concepts like attitudes, goals, identity, and stereotypes as operating nonconsciously. And yet, modern social psychology proposes that these constructs have active existence distinct from conscious, deliberate, and intentional experience (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). The rapidly accumulating literature of implicit influences on social perception, judgment, and action is a consequence of a surge in methodological innovations that manipulate concepts without participants’ attention or recognition or that measure concepts without participants’ awareness or control. These advances make possible a whole new class of questions such as the following: When will implicit processes predict behavior? How do implicit and explicit mental operations influence one another? What does it really mean for something to be implicit or explicit? How do distinctions between implicit and explicit methods correspond to distinctions between implicit and explicit constructs? This article briefly examines the relationship between implicit and explicit processes with an emphasis on one construct, attitudes, and one implicit measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), because accumulation of knowledge about this construct and this measure has been rapid. IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEASURES An explicit response is controllable, intended, made with awareness, and requires cognitive resources. Measures of implicit cognition comprise a heterogeneous set of methods and procedures that differ from measures of explicit cognition by having at least one of the following characteristics: (a) reduced controllability; (b) lack of intention; (c) reduced awareness of the origins, meaning, or occurrence of a response; or (d) high efficiency of processing (Bargh, 1994). Treating these characteristics as a set reflects the lack of evidence for clear distinctions between them rather than a theoretical commitment that they operate the same way. Assessing explicit attitudes can be simple, such as asking, ‘‘Which do you prefer, summer or winter?’’ Assessing implicit attitudes is usually more indirect. In the IAT, items representing four categories (e.g., summer, winter, pleasant, unpleasant) are sorted as quickly as possible in two different conditions. In one condition, items representing summer and pleasant are categorized with the same response (pressing a certain key on the computer), and items representing winter and unpleasant are categorized with an alternate response (another key). In the second condition, items representing winter and pleasant are categorized with one response and items representing summer Address correspondence to Brian Nosek, University of Virginia, Department of Psychology, Box 400400, Charlottesville, VA 22904; e-mail: [email protected]. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 16—Number 2 65 Copyright r 2007 Association for Psychological Science and unpleasant are categorized with the alternate response. The difference in response times between conditions is an indication of association strengths between the concepts and evaluations. Respondents who categorize items more quickly when summer is paired with pleasant (and winter with unpleasant) are said to have an implicit preference for summer compared to winter (try the IAT at https://implicit.harvard.edu/ ). Explicit and implicit measurement methods have little in common in terms of their procedures. Unlike in explicit attitude assessments, in the IAT, participants do not decide or deliberate about their feelings, they just categorize items as fast as possible. The dramatic difference in methodology leads to reasonable questions of whether and to what degree the assessed constructs are related. DESCRIPTIVE ACCOUNTS Evaluations revealed by implicit and explicit measures may have nothing in common, in which case they assess exclusive constructs, and one (implicit measures) might even not be considered an attitude measure. At the opposite extreme, implicit and explicit attitude measures might assess a single construct despite their procedural differences. All differences between measures, in that case, would be attributable to extraneous influences that are irrelevant to attitudes. An intermediate possibility is that implicit and explicit measures assess constructs that are related but distinct. Specifically, implicit and explicit measures might have something in common justifying their shared interpretation as attitude assessments, and something unique justifying the implicit–explicit distinction. This possibility would spur theorists to account for common and distinct influences on implicit and explicit attitude formation and change and for reciprocal influences of implicit and explicit attitudes on each other.