Is Implicit Self-Esteem Really Unconscious?: Implicit Self-Esteem Eludes Conscious Reflection

The current work examined the untested assumption that implicit self-esteem is nonconscious and cannot be assessed consciously. Participants completed measures of implicit and explicit self-esteem. Later, they guessed their level of implicit or unconscious self-esteem. Results indicated that participants were largely unable to assess consciously their implicit self-esteem. Estimations of implicit self-esteem were correlated moderately-strong with explicit self-esteem but negligibly with actual implicit self-esteem. These results indicate that implicit self-esteem is indeed nonconscious. In addition, participants high (vs. low) in explicit self-esteem more severely overestimated their implicit self-esteem, and participants low (vs. high) in implicit self-esteem seemed more uncertain about their implicit self-esteem, as indicated by a larger absolute difference between their explicit self-esteem and estimated implicit self-esteem.