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Implicit versus Explicit Attitudes: Differing Manifestations of the Same Representational Structures?

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Abstract

Implicit and explicit attitudes manifest themselves as distinct and partly dissociable behavioral dispositions. It is natural to think that these differences reflect differing underlying representations. The present article argues that this may be a mistake. Although non-verbal and verbal measures of attitudes often dissociate (and frequently conflict), this may be because the two types of outcome-measure are differentially impacted by other factors, not because they are tapping into distinct kinds of representation or distinct storage systems. I arrive at this view through closer consideration than is usual of the mechanisms and processes that underlie overt behavior.

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Notes

  1. For an argument that the real-world effects of implicit attitudes are only minor ones, see Oswald et al. (2013). For a careful and measured reply, see Greenwald et al. (2015).

  2. Throughout I shall understand verbal behavior broadly, to include any form of communicative response. Hence communicating one’s attitudes towards black people on a “thermometer scale” counts as verbal, in this broad sense. The rationale is that all such behavior is subject to communicative and social norms, and is apt to engage reflective forms of cognition.

  3. In fact, I believe that all amodal beliefs (setting aside instances of seeing-as and hearing-as) are unconscious, whereas the valence and arousal components of affective states can be conscious (Carruthers 2011, 2015; see also Mandelbaum 2014). The latter point will play some role in the Section 4.

  4. Archetypal cognitive attitudes would include memories and beliefs; affective attitudes include emotions like fear and disgust, as well as feelings of desire and repulsion.

  5. Do people then change their attitudes after the questions have been asked? They will hear themselves as believing that it would be okay for tuition to be raised, for example; and so they likely accept (and come to believe) that they have such a belief. This is a new belief about their beliefs, rather than a change in their first-order attitudes. But it may still have effects on behavior just as if the latter had altered. And indeed, in one of the few investigations of the persistence of dissonance-induced attitude change, the effects on people’s expressed attitudes were still discernable a month after the initial experiment (Sénémeaud and Somat 2009).

  6. Note that unthinkingly here means without conscious consideration of alternatives, not unintentionally; on the contrary, the action results from an unconscious decision.

  7. Note that this one-representation view provides a simple and elegant explanation for the fact that implicit and explicit attitudes, while partly dissociated, are nevertheless reliably correlated. Dual-representation accounts, in contrast, are forced to appeal to other factors to explain the correlation (such as the existence of common pathways in the acquisition process, for example).

  8. Not all beliefs are explicitly stored, of course. Some are dispositions to construct such representations by inference from those that are explicitly stored, as in Dennett's (1978) example of the belief one would manifest when asked whether or not zebras in the wild wear overcoats. Never having considered the question previously, one doesn’t have a ready-stored answer. But one answers unhesitatingly nevertheless. Moreover, not all stored information should be described as a form of belief. This is because information about the statistical structure of the environment is collected and stored (perhaps associatively) for many different specialized purposes without being available to influence central decision making or verbal report. For example, it enriches the predictive models that are employed in low-level visual processing (Kok et al. 2013). There is no reason to think that stereotypes fall into this category, however. Indeed, there is good reason to think that they do not, since stereotypes are recognized by people who have them even if they aren’t consciously endorsed.

  9. This is the basis of stereotype-based humor. One could not find mother-in-law jokes funny if one was unaware of the stereotype for mothers-in-law.

  10. Although initially puzzling, in may be that this is one of the main mechanisms of evaluative learning. In highly social creatures such as ourselves it is surely adaptive to have a mechanism that can convert socially-acquired evaluative beliefs into felt values (affective dispositions). This is especially likely given that values tend to be one of the main markers that distinguish in-groups from out-groups, and given that the desires and preferences shared by most members of one’s community are likely to be adaptive ones.

  11. Hahn et al. (2014) also found that when people had their explicit attitudes re-tested following completion of the IAT, those attitudes had shifted significantly towards their implicit ones. Given the framework I have outlined this should not be surprising. For one of the motives in play in explicit-attitude reporting (albeit competing with others) is to say what one believes one’s attitude to be. Since people had recently received evidence of their racial biases through learning of their IAT results, this would exert a pressure to alter their explicit reports accordingly.

  12. Hu et al. (2017) report findings comparable to those of Gregg et al. (2006). These findings admit of a similar explanation to the one I advance here for the latter, however.

  13. In addition, it seems likely that participants would also have formed stereotype representations of the two groups through the conditioning process. For they were told at the outset that they would be learning about the characteristics of the two social groups, and they were asked to keep clear in their minds which group possessed which characteristics. A name drawn from one group paired with the word “vicious”, for example, would then lead participants to believe that members of that group are vicious.

  14. Indeed, Gilbert et al. (2012) show using fMRI and multivariate pattern analysis that the information whether black or white faces are seen can be decoded from orbitofrontal cortex when participants are making likely-friend judgments, but can be decoded from anterior medial prefrontal cortex when participants are making athleticism judgments. The former region is a classic part of the affective network, whereas the latter is often implicated in social-cognitive and stereotype judgments.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Luca Barlassina, Greg Currie, Dan Kelly, Dan Moller, Jeremy Pober, Brent Strickland, and anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Peter Carruthers

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Carruthers, P. Implicit versus Explicit Attitudes: Differing Manifestations of the Same Representational Structures?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 51–72 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0354-3

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