Abstract
I offer here a new hypothesis about the nature of implicit attitudes. Psychologists and philosophers alike often distinguish implicit from explicit attitudes by maintaining that we are aware of the latter, but not aware of the former. Recent experimental evidence, however, seems to challenge this account. It would seem, for example, that participants are frequently quite adept at predicting their own performances on measures of implicit attitudes. I propose here that most theorists in this area have nonetheless overlooked a commonsense distinction regarding how we can be aware of attitudes, a difference that fundamentally distinguishes implicit and explicit attitudes. Along the way, I discuss the implications that this distinction may hold for future debates about and experimental investigations into the nature of implicit attitudes.
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Notes
I acknowledge that there is growing controversy about the existence of implicit attitudes (for popular summary, see, e.g., Goldhill 2017). Recent meta-analyses, for example, seem to indicate that the predictive validity of measures of implicit bias and stereotyping behavior is rather small (for an overview, see, e.g., Greenwald et al 2015). But implicit measures such as IATs do seem to reveal some variety of psychological kind (but, see, e.g., Machery 2016); I thus proceed on the assumption that there are implicit attitudes, whether or not they are comparatively weak attitudes.
Rosenthal offers this distinction in the context of defending his higher-order theory of consciousness, on which a mental state is conscious just in case one is aware of being in it in a suitable way. And as we shall see, in regards to the hypothesis proposed here, a higher-order theorist might consider explicit but not implicit attitudes as conscious; indeed, I am drawn to this view. But since my goal here is not to become embroiled in debates over consciousness, I will not defend this position. Any theory of consciousness must be consistent with Rosenthal’s distinction in modes of awareness.
SU- and SM- modes of awareness are not mutually exclusive. One might be aware of an attitude in both ways if, for example, I have SU-awareness of the attitude but also receive testimony that I have it.
What explains the difference in these kinds of awareness? I do not defend a specific proposal here, but Rosenthal (e.g., 2005, chapter 7) offers the sensible hypothesis that one’s awareness of an attitude consists in having a suitable occurrent higher-order thought (“HOT”) about that state. To be aware of my belief that p is to have the occurrent HOT that I believe that p. The difference in modes of awareness thus consists in whether or not one is aware of mental processes that cause the relevant HOTs about one’s states. If I am SU-aware of my belief that p, then I have the HOT that I believe that p and I need not be aware of inferences or observations that may have caused that thought. By contrast, if I am SM-aware of my belief, I have the HOT that I have that thought and I am aware of inferences or observations that caused me to have that thought. But other explanations may be available.
I focus here only on cases wherein attitudes are occurrent. But we often talk of attitudes in their dispositional forms: one might believe that 2 + 2 = 4, even if one is not currently having that thought, insofar as one is disposed to have the occurrent thought that 2 + 2 = 4. Thus one need not be aware of that attitude at all. But we may regard such beliefs as explicit insofar as one is disposed to be SU-aware of it. Some theorists seem to assume that some types of attitude, such as beliefs, can only occur unconsciously or implicitly (e.g., Schwitzgebel 2010; Mandelbaum 2014). But one arguably can have the very same occurrent attitude both implicitly and explicitly. Since some do use ‘belief’ only in the dispositional way, one might replace instances of ‘belief’ throughout with ‘occurrent assertoric propositional thought’.
Does it follow that we should regard Oedipal beliefs of which we are only SM-aware as implicit? It need not follow, as my account only holds that it is a necessary condition on an attitude’s being implicit that one not be SU-aware of it. It may be that we use ‘implicit attitude’ to refer to socially biasing attitudes, rather than any attitude of which are not disposed to be SU-aware. That said, I see nothing wrong with calling an Oedipal belief ‘implicit’. What about bodily states, such as my liver’s state of cirrhosis? Plainly we do not regard such states as implicit because they are not even mental states, let alone attitudes.
This compromise may still seem implausible. It might seem that participants in the Nisbett-and-Wilson experiments do not at any time prefer the consumer goods for their intrinsic qualities. But such a view is puzzling: which of the participants’ attitudes regarding the goods at the time of verbally reporting their reasons for their judgments are then explicit? I favor the explanation that participants have had contradictory preferences: at the time of selecting the good, they implicitly preferred it for its location; and at the time of verbal report, they explicitly preferred the good for its intrinsic qualities. That is, the latter preferences drive their verbal reports and the former drive their selection behaviors. The participants are, of course, incorrect about which attitude drove their selection behavior. Moreover, it is plausible that at the time of verbal report such an implicit attitude was extinguished when the explicit attitude was formed. But what reason would we have for thinking the confabulated attitudes reported are explicit, if not for the fact that participants are SU-aware of and can thus spontaneously report them? I address the possibility that the attitudes that one fails to report are actually explicit but quickly forgotten or rejected in Sect. 4.2.
The present account has some affinities with the view recently proposed by Levy (2017, p. 535; cf. 2014a, p. 30), which holds that a crucial feature of implicit attitudes is that we can be only inferentially, and not introspectively, aware of them. Moreover, Levy similarly seems to hold that we can be introspectively aware of explicit attitudes, while acknowledging that we may not in fact have introspective access to any attitudes. However, the present view differs from Levy’s suggestive remarks insofar as he does not draw a distinction between one’s genuinely direct awareness of an attitude and SU-awareness; nor does he hold that the characteristic feature of explicit attitudes is that we are SU-aware of them. Rather, he endorses an Intrinsic View, which locates the central difference between explicit and implicit attitudes in their roles in inference and other psychological processes.
I do not deny that individuals may insincerely report that they do not have biased attitudes of which they are SU-aware. Because such attitudes are socially unacceptable, we should expect that some might lie about such attitudes. But I do suspect that there are cases of honest people who, despite biased performances on implicit measures, genuinely do not believe that they have such attitudes at all.
Levy (e.g., Levy 2014a, b, 2015) offers what might seem like another reason to deny that people are in any way deceptive when they fail to report their implicit attitudes—namely, that since on his Intrinsic View implicit attitudes are not sufficiently integrated into our mental lives, one cannot be morally responsible for actions driven by them. But even if one cannot be blamed for failing to report one’s implicit attitudes, if it were the case that one is SU-aware of them, then it would seem at least that one is not being totally forthcoming—and again would be reasonably expected to report such states. So even if an Intrinsic View were true, we are left with the unsavory conclusion that we must attribute to people a kind of (perhaps blameless) caginess. In any case, the idea that we cannot be morally responsible for actions driven by implicit attitudes is questionable (see, e.g., Brownstein 2016; but see Levy 2015, p. 547, fn. 11). Moreover, as I argue shortly, the Awareness View undercuts many reasons to endorse Intrinsic Views such as Levy’s. Much light would be shed on the issue of our moral responsibility vis-à-vis implicit attitudes if the Awareness View proves true and implicit attitudes are mere beliefs of a kind. But that is a topic for future exploration.
Such results need not come as a shock or disappointment to everyone—some people may, of course, have biased explicit attitudes that are not in tension with their implicit attitudes.
As far as I can tell, there is not much direct experimental evidence that people are often surprised to find that they harbor implicit attitudes, which is why I draw here only on Banaji’s anecdotal remarks and comments from Montheith’s debriefing sessions. This is plainly an issue that could be explored by future experimental work.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for this interesting objection.
Indeed, in a partial replication of Bem and McConnell’s work, Chris and Woodyard (1973) found that participants who rated their pre-manipulation attitudes as subjectively important were less likely to forget them, even if the manipulation did result in a change in those attitudes. That is to say, participants were more likely to confabulate their explicit attitudes if these attitudes were unimportant to them. On the reasonable assumption that one’s attitudes about social (in)equality would be rather important to one, we would thus expect that people would be unlikely to forget their biased attitudes, even if such attitudes did change during the experimental conditions. But, again, this is not what we find.
This line of argumentation was suggested to me by Jake Quilty-Dunn.
One might object that such evidence demonstrates only that people as they mature in age are unlikely to report their social biases, not that they have ceased to be SU-aware of them. But, again, such an explanation thus faces the objection that people are not being sincere or at least forthright—and so a more natural explanation of the fact they do not report such attitudes is that they are not (SU-)aware of them.
For a similar discussion, see Carruthers (2018).
I thank James Skidmore for this suggestion.
For a related account of dumbfounding regarding moral beliefs, see, e.g., Haidt and Hersh (2001).
Some theories of emotions regard them as mere “feelings” with no content, whereas others hold that emotional states represent, among other things, bodily states or relations between the environment and the subject (for an overview, see, e.g., Prinz 2004). But it is at best unclear that emotional states have the suitable sort of content to qualify as (complete) implicit attitudes.
One might worry that since the Awareness View holds that an attitude is explicit just in case one is aware or disposed to be SU-aware of it, the fact that we can become SU-aware of an attitude that was putatively implicit shows that it was explicit all along. That is, this evidence might instead seem to suggest, like Hahn et al. work, that we can be and easily are aware of our implicit attitudes. But notice that participants in this study would not report attitudes in line with their implicit biases if they were not so led to reflect on their attitudes—and my proposal is that such reflection changes how one can be aware of those attitudes. Though we can become SU-aware of a once-implicit attitude, this does not show that, prior to becoming aware of it, one was disposed to become SU-aware of it. The fact that a bachelor can get married does not entail that he is disposed to be married. That is, I argue that certain psychological changes, such as reflecting on the reasons for one’s having an attitude, might alter one’s dispositions regarding it.
On Rosenthal’s account (see fn. 5), the HOTs in virtue of which we are SU-aware of our extrinsic attitudes do not alter their functional profiles (see, e.g., Rosenthal 2005, p. 185).
Some theorists do maintain that the relevant kind of awareness of states is an intrinsic feature of those states (e.g., Kriegel 2009), in which case the Awareness View trivially amounts to a kind of Intrinsic View. But that’s an optional commitment of the account. If the relevant awareness is extrinsic, then the present proposal amounts to a version of a single-process model (e.g., Fazio 1990). And other theorists recently seem to be converging on similar views. Carruthers (2018), for example, defends the view that implicit and explicit attitudes have the same representational structures, though their different behavioral manifestations can be explained by the kinds of other states with which they are tokened. The present view is in many ways compatible with Carruthers’ account, which differs from it insofar as Carruthers does not emphasize a difference in awareness as the fundamental maker.
There is, however, evidence for Intrinsic Views that the Awareness View does not as clearly bear upon. For example, Levy (2015, p. 815) discusses fascinating work suggesting that implicit attitudes seem to be, unlike beliefs, unresponsive to negation—that they are equally affected by presentations of expressions and negations of those expressions (e.g., Deutsch et al 2006; cf. Madva 2016). While there are reasons to think that implicit attitudes can be responsive to negation (e.g., Mandelbaum 2016, p. 640), I cannot settle this issue here.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Ralph Baergen, Zac Gershberg, Rocco Gennaro, Neil Levy, Eric Mandelbaum, Myrto Mylopoulos, Bence Nanay, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Evan Rodriguez, James Skidmore, Brent Strickland, two referees for this journal, as well as the audiences at the Conference on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Moral Responsibility at Utah Valley University in March 2015, the Anthropology Department Colloquium at Idaho State University in April 2015, and the 2017 Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology for their helpful discussions of these issues or comments on previous drafts of this material.
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Berger, J. Implicit attitudes and awareness. Synthese 197, 1291–1312 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1754-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1754-3