Are People Aware of Automatic Attitudes?

Source: iStock image by Designer491 licensed to Art Markman

Over the past few decades, psychologists have recognized that people have two kinds of attitudes toward objects, events, and people in the world. One type of attitude is explicit and durable. These attitudes are the ones that are the source of judgments that people make when asked how they feel about those objects, events, and people. If you’re asked what you think about chocolate ice cream, for example, your experiences will have given you a durable attitude that you can access and that enables you to answer that question.

Your overall attitude toward chocolate ice cream may be complicated. You know it is delicious, but also that it has a lot of calories, and that the cream can upset your stomach. As a result, your overall attitude may be lukewarm, You are positive about it, but don’t consider it a favorite food.

That said, your response to an attitude question might also be influenced by the answer you know you are supposed to give. So, even if you don’t like chocolate ice cream very much, you might still feel like you have to say that you do, because other people will judge you if you say you don’t. So the responses to questions you are posed about your durable attitude can be influenced by knowledge about the socially desirable response.

In addition to these durable attitudes, there are also automatic attitudes that can be accessed quickly that may sometimes conflict with these more durable attitudes. These automatic attitudes reflect common associations you may have formed between the objects, events, or people and other concepts that may be positive or negative.

Your automatic attitude about chocolate ice cream (in contrast to that more durable attitude) might be driven by associations you have formed between ice cream and factors like its taste, the fun times you had in the past while eating it, and images from ads you have seen. In this case, your automatic attitude may be more positive than your durable attitude.

These automatic attitudes are assessed with tests in which people respond quickly to items. A popular test for automatic attitudes is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The details of how this test works have been described in many places. For now, the main thing that is important is that tests like the IAT work by demonstrating that people are faster to respond when items that have positive associations require pressing the same button as words that are positive than when these words require pressing the same button as words that are negative. This test provides a way of assessing whether a particular concept is associated with other positive or negative concepts.

A lot of the early work on these automatic attitudes was done in the context of topics like prejudice against particular racial and ethnic groups. The research suggested that people may have positive durable attitudes toward these groups, but may still have experienced negative associations that may lead to negative automatic attitudes. Because people often do not acknowledge these automatically activated attitudes, the early research referred to them as implicit attitudes, where implicit refers to something that is not consciously accessible. The idea is that even people who do not admit to a particular prejudice against a group may still have negative associations to members of that group.

Calling these attitudes implicit has generated a lot of debate in psychological research about whether these initial associations are truly inaccessible to conscious reflection, or whether they are simply automatically generated.

Part of what drives this debate is a growing number of studies that have demonstrated that people are aware of their automatic associations. These studies generally demonstrate that people are able to predict how their score on tests like the IAT will come out, suggesting they have some awareness of their automatic attitudes.

A 2023 paper by Adam Morris and Benedek Kurdi in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General took a comprehensive look at this question. They suggested that it is possible that people are aware of their automatic attitudes, but before reaching that conclusion, it is important to rule out plausible alternatives. For example, people may be able to predict their score on a test of automatic attitudes not because they are aware of their own automatic attitudes, but rather because they are aware of how people like them typically might answer. For example, if you were given a test of automatic attitudes about Democratic and Republican politicians, you might believe that you would respond with positive automatic attitudes to Democrats if you identify as a Democrat, but with negative automatic attitudes to Democrats if you identify as a Republican.

Across studies, Morris and Kurdi used a few different tests of automatic attitudes to ensure that their findings weren’t the result of using any specific method. They found that people are able to use knowledge of their own (and other people’s) demographic characteristics to predict some of the individual differences in scores on tests like the IAT. However, people are still better able to predict their own scores on these tests of automatic attitudes than can be explained just by these alternative explanations. These findings suggest that many people do have some conscious access to their automatic attitudes.

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Another interesting finding of these studies, though, was that there was a significant minority of participants who seemed to be completely unable to predict their score on a test of automatic attitudes. This finding suggests that while some people do have conscious access to their automatic attitudes, not everyone does.

These results are important, because they suggest that the term implicit attitude is misleading. It conjures an image of people’s behavior being affected by factors they are completely unaware of. Instead, the present findings suggest that people may be influenced by associations that are automatically available when people encounter a particular item. Because people have some awareness of these associations, it may be possible for them to learn to overcome their initial feelings and reason more carefully about these items in the future.