Privately expressed attitudes mediate the relationship between public and implicit attitudes

Introduction Implicit attitudes are preferences that exist outside of conscious awareness or conscious control. Recent evidence demonstrates that these preferences are variably related to selfreported (explicit) measures of preference. For example, Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald (in press; Group Dynamics) showed that correspondence between implicit and explicit measures partially depends on the target attitude object (see Table). Features of the assessment context may also moderate the Implicit-Explicit relationship. In this study, we examined variation in I-E correspondence when attitudes were reported in a public versus private context. People are more likely to admit to undesirable behaviors and express more negative attitudes toward stigmatized groups in private versus public contexts. This is thought to occur because selfpresentational concerns are decreased when others will not be privy to the preferences reported. One distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes is the relative imperviousness of implicit attitudes to self-presentational biases. One effect of decreasing presentational biases of the reporting context (by allowing private rather than public expression) may be to increase the correspondence between implicit and explicit preferences.