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Abstract
Explicitly, humans can distinguish their own attitudes from evaluations possessed by others. Implicitly, the viability of a distinction between attitudes and evaluative knowledge is less clear. We investigated relations between explicit attitudes, cultural knowledge and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In seven studies (158 samples, N=107,709), the IAT was reliably and variably related to explicit attitudes, and explicit attitudes accounted for the relationship between the IAT and cultural knowledge. We suggest that people do not have introspective access to the associations formed via experience in a culture. Ownership of mental associations is established by presence in mind and influence on thinking, feeling and doing. Regardless of origin, associations are influential depending on their availability, accessibility, salience, and applicability. Distinguishing associations as “not mine” is a self-regulatory act and contributes to the distinction between explicit evaluation, where such acts are routine, and implicit evaluation, where they are not.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH68447).
Thanks to Mahzarin Banaji, Jerry Clore, Tony Greenwald, Fred Smyth, Bethany Teachman, Tim Wilson and Mark Zanna for helpful comments. Supplementary materials can be found at http://briannosek.com/.
Notes
1Other ways to represent cultural attitudes are to calculate the mean, median, or mode explicit (or implicit) attitude response from a representative sample of a culture. This approach is a cultural level of analysis whereas, for this paper, we are interested in the influence of cultural knowledge on individual minds. That is, does an individual's cultural knowledge influence their explicit or implicit evaluation?
2For Studies 2–7, 40 trials were used in this block based on recommendations from Nosek, Greenwald, and Banaji (Citation2005) to reduce the influence of the order of combined tasks.
3Also, participants with peanut and shellfish allergies were recruited directly at a private website following Olson and Fazio's hypothesis that they should be particularly likely to evidence implicit negativity toward the food domain to which they were allergic. Because only 14 were recruited successfully, these data are not reported separately in the text—see supplementary materials for a report. Substantive results do not differ whether these participants are included or excluded.
4In brief, we also administered the “personalised” IAT introduced by Olson and Fazio (2004) as a corrective IAT design to reduce the influence of extrapersonal (e.g., cultural) knowledge. Nosek and Hansen (2007) found that the procedural changes do not influence the relationship with cultural knowledge, but do encourage a task recoding confound in which participants are more likely to explicitly evaluate the target concepts (e.g., Bush, Kerry) instead of just categorising them as instructed.
5This was observed for every one of the six knowledge items for both criterion variables (rs=.20–.62, ps<.0003). Dates of data collection were 28 May 2004 to 10 August 2004.
6This is one more topic than was examined by Nosek (2005). We also examined attitudes toward Burger King compared to McDonalds.
7Han et al. (2006) also found that an alternative form of the IAT was not sensitive to the manipulation and interpreted this as evidence that their alternative version was a more construct valid assessment of attitudes because it was not influenced by the children's statements. We disagree with the theoretical expectation that the statements should not influence implicit attitudes, described next, and we have suggested that the different effects by IAT versions is at least partly a consequence of the alternative being influenced by explicit evaluation processes (see Nosek & Hansen, 2007).