Implicit Social Cognition Greenwald, Anthony G; Lai, Calvin K
Annual review of psychology,
01/2020, Volume:
71, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In the last 20 years, research on implicit social cognition has established that social judgments and behavior are guided by attitudes and stereotypes of which the actor may lack awareness. Research ...using the methods of implicit social cognition has produced the concept of implicit bias, which has generated wide attention not only in social, clinical, and developmental psychology, but also in disciplines outside of psychology, including business, law, criminal justice, medicine, education, and political science. Although this rapidly growing body of research offers prospects of useful societal applications, the theory needed to confidently guide those applications remains insufficiently developed. This article describes the methods that have been developed, the findings that have been obtained, and the theoretical questions that remain to be answered.
Using data from 217 research reports (N = 36,071, compared to 3,471 and 5,433 in previous meta-analyses), this meta-analysis investigated the conceptual and methodological conditions under which ...Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes, stereotypes, and identity correlate with criterion measures of intergroup behavior. We found significant implicit-criterion correlations (ICCs) and explicit-criterion correlations (ECCs), with unique contributions of implicit (β = .14) and explicit measures (β = .11) revealed by structural equation modeling. ICCs were found to be highly heterogeneous, making moderator analyses necessary. Basic study features or conceptual variables did not account for any heterogeneity: Unlike explicit measures, implicit measures predicted for all target groups and types of behavior, and implicit, but not explicit, measures were equally associated with behaviors varying in controllability and conscious awareness. However, ICCs differed greatly by methodological features: Studies with a declared focus on ICCs, standard IATs rather than variants, high-polarity attributes, behaviors measured in a relative (two categories present) rather than absolute manner (single category present), and high implicit-criterion correspondence (k = 13) produced a mean ICC of r = .37. Studies scoring low on these variables (k = 6) produced an ICC of r = .02. Examination of methodological properties-a novelty of this meta-analysis-revealed that most studies were vastly underpowered and analytic strategies regularly ignored measurement error. Recommendations, along with online applications for calculating statistical power and internal consistency are provided to improve future studies on the implicit-criterion relationship.
La investigación en cognición implícita ha aumentado de manera vertiginosa durante las últimas décadas, principalmente por el uso generalizado de procedimientos experimentales conocidos como medidas ...implícitas. A diferencia de los cuestionarios de autoinforme, estas metodologías impiden que sesgos como la deseabilidad social afecten las respuestas de los participantes, lo que permite abordar temas sensibles. Sin embargo, las medidas implícitas difieren en aspectos como las instrucciones, los materiales o los indicadores conductuales analizados. Debido a esto, hay controversia sobre la naturaleza de los procesos que están siendo medidos, las características que se les atribuyen y, por ende, la posibilidad de hacer comparaciones entre los estudios que emplean diferentes medidas implícitas. Basándose en un modelo de procesamiento dual, este trabajo propone que las medidas implícitas pueden entenderse como indicadores de procesos automáticos. A partir de dicha propuesta, se discuten los requisitos que las medidas implícitas deben cumplir y algunos desafíos para la investigación en automaticidad. Cómo citar este artículo: Parra, J. A., & Tamayo, R. M. (2021). Medidas Implícitas en Cognición: una Aproximación al Estudio de la Automaticidad. Revista Colombiana de Psicología, 30(1), 89-110. https://doi.org/10.15446/rcp.v30n1.85106
In the 1970s, memory researchers converged on interesting phenomena observed in Korsakoff-syndrome amnesic patients. These patients' performances on difficult tasks were reliably improved by practice ...sessions from which they could recall nothing. Related findings of indirect memory effects in college students triggered wide attention to phenomena that, in 1985, were first identified as implicit memory. Within a decade, the indirect measurement methods of implicit memory research had spread to social psychologists' studies of attitudes and stereotypes. After another two decades, the methods and findings of this developing revolution have revised understanding of how past learning, operating in ways that bypass conscious awareness, nevertheless shapes conscious judgment and perception. This revolution in psychological thinking is on the cusp of reconceiving the relation between unconscious and conscious mental process. Further, it demands researchers' careful attention to justification for many self-report measures that are now routinely treated as face-valid.
As public awareness of implicit bias has grown in recent years, studies have raised important new questions about the nature of implicit bias effects. First, implicit biases are widespread and robust ...on average, yet are unstable across a few weeks. Second, young children display implicit biases indistinguishable from those of adults, which suggests to many that implicit biases are learned early. Yet, if implicit biases are unstable over weeks, how can they be stable for decades? Third, meta-analyses suggest that individual differences in implicit bias are associated weakly, although significantly, with individual differences in behavioral outcomes. Yet, studies of aggregate levels of implicit bias (i.e., countries, states, counties) are strongly associated with aggregate levels of disparities and discrimination. These puzzles are difficult to reconcile with traditional views, which treat implicit bias as an early-learned attitude that drives discrimination among individuals who are high in bias. We propose an alternative view of implicit bias, rooted in concept accessibility. Concept accessibility can, in principle, vary both chronically and situationally. The empirical evidence, however, suggests that most of the systematic variance in implicit bias is situational. Akin to the "wisdom of crowds" effect, implicit bias may emerge as the aggregate effect of individual fluctuations in concept accessibility that are ephemeral and context-dependent. This bias of crowds theory treats implicit bias tests as measures of situations more than persons. We show how the theory can resolve the puzzles posed and generate new insights into how and why implicit bias propagates inequalities.
This review of 122 research reports (184 independent samples, 14,900 subjects) found average
r
= .274 for prediction of behavioral, judgment, and physiological measures by Implicit Association Test ...(IAT) measures. Parallel explicit (i.e., self-report) measures, available in 156 of these samples (13,068 subjects), also predicted effectively (average
r
= .361), but with much greater variability of effect size. Predictive validity of self-report was impaired for socially sensitive topics, for which impression management may distort self-report responses. For 32 samples with criterion measures involving Black-White interracial behavior, predictive validity of IAT measures significantly exceeded that of self-report measures. Both IAT and self-report measures displayed incremental validity, with each measure predicting criterion variance beyond that predicted by the other. The more highly IAT and self-report measures were intercorrelated, the greater was the predictive validity of each.
Self-esteem, arguably the most important attitudes an individual possesses, has been a premier research topic in psychology for more than a century. Following a surge of interest in implicit attitude ...measures in the 90s, researchers have tried to assess self-esteem implicitly to circumvent the influence of biases inherent in explicit measures. However, the validity of implicit self-esteem measures remains elusive. Critical tests are often inconclusive, as the validity of such measures is examined in the backdrop of imperfect behavioral measures. To overcome this serious limitation, we tested the neural validity of the most widely used implicit self-esteem measure, the implicit association test (IAT). Given the conceptualization of self-esteem as attitude toward the self, and neuroscience findings that the reward-related brain regions represent an individual's attitude or preference for an object when viewing its image, individual differences in implicit self-esteem should be associated with neural signals in the reward-related regions during passive-viewing of self-face (the most obvious representation of the self). Using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) on functional MRI (fMRI) data, we demonstrate that the neural signals in the reward-related regions were robustly associated with implicit (but not explicit) self-esteem, thus providing unique evidence for the neural validity of the self-esteem IAT. In addition, both implicit and explicit self-esteem were related, although differently, to neural signals in regions involved in self-processing. Our finding highlights the utility of neuroscience methods in addressing fundamental psychological questions and providing unique insights into important psychological constructs.
Implicit bias reflects systemic racism Payne, B. Keith; Hannay, Jason W.
Trends in cognitive sciences,
November 2021, 2021-11-00, 20211101, Volume:
25, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Implicit bias refers to automatically evoked mental associations about social groups. The idea has been influential across the social sciences as a way to explain persistent racial disparities amid ...changing self-report attitudes. Most research has treated implicit bias as an individual attitude. However, evidence suggests that it is neither a stable individual difference nor a strong correlate of individual behavior. Moreover, the individual-focused approach can lead researchers to neglect systemic racism as a cause of persistent disparities. We argue that implicit bias can be considered a cognitive reflection of systemic racism in the environment. In this view, implicit bias is an ongoing set of associations based on inequalities and stereotypes in the environment. As such, implicit bias changes when contexts change.
Implicit bias has typically been understood as an individual attitude. We challenge this assumption by showing that implicit bias is neither a stable individual difference nor a robust predictor of individual behavior. Instead, we argue that implicit bias reflects the mind’s ongoing predictions based on regularities in the environment.This context-based view of implicit bias suggests that the average level of bias in an environment, such as a workplace, city, or country, is diagnostic of the systemic racism in that environment.Implicit bias may serve as a marker of – and a driver of – systemic inequalities.Although efforts to reduce implicit bias may be effective in the short term, longer term change is more likely to come from directly changing systems, policies, and processes that sustain inequalities.
Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a popular tool that is widely used in the field of social cognition. Part of the reason why is because the IAT is often used as a measurement of implicit social ...bias—though this assumption has been increasingly challenged in the literature. In this short review, we focus on a variety of cognitive mechanisms that can possibly explain the IAT’s output, and argue that IAT is a downstream measurement that can be reflecting either: 1) implicit attitude, 2) explicit attitude, or 3) explicit but concealed attitude. As such, studies that attempt to infer implicitness or dissociate explicit and implicit attitudes may require caution in data interpretation.
The latest developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have given rise to many ethical and socio-economic concerns. Nonetheless, the impact of AI technologies is evident and tangible in ...our everyday life. This dichotomy leads to mixed feelings toward AI: people recognize the positive impact of AI, but they also show concerns, especially about their privacy and security. In this article, we try to understand whether the implicit and explicit attitudes toward AI are coherent. We investigated explicit and implicit attitudes toward AI by combining a self-report measure and an implicit measure, i.e., the implicit association test. We analyzed the explicit and implicit responses of 829 participants. Results revealed that while most of the participants explicitly express a positive attitude toward AI, their implicit responses seem to point in the opposite direction. Results also show that, in both the explicit and implicit measures, females show a more negative attitude than males, and people who work in the field of AI are inclined to be positive toward AI.
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