Greenwald 1995 - Implicit Social Cognition - Attitudes, Self-Esteem, and Stereotypes

Google Scholar Link

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological review, 102(1), 4.

Summary

Implicit cognition refers to unconscious thought. Since it is unconscious, it will not show up in self-report data, as the subject is unaware of its influence. This necessitates the use of indirect measures, or measures that do not reveal to the subject what it is they are measuring. The effects of implicit cognition will sometimes be rationalized by the subject as being related to some stimulus characteristic. For example, subjects doing a word-completion task might unconsciously be using words from a list to which they were casually exposed. An implicit attitude is when an existing attitude is used to evaluate (or applied to) a new object. Attitudes are based on past experience, are valenced, and consist of a disposition to respond in a specific way. Thus, certain attitudes result in certain behaviors.

Three important types of implicit cognition are attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Since all three are implicit, all three are “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified).” Examples of implicit attitudes include halo effects (in which one positive characteristic is substituted for others, e.g., attractive men are judged to be of better character), the mere exposure effect (wherein frequently encountered stimuli are liked more), and context effects (e.g., in a telephone survey, people called on a sunny day had a higher self-reported quality-of-life than did people called on a rainy day). Examples of implicit self-esteem effects include the instant endowment effect (also called mere ownership, e.g., value given to a mug goes up as soon as it is owned), in-group bias, homophily, liking stimuli better solely because they were chosen rather than assigned, and fundamental attribution error (wherein subjects blame external causes for failures and internal causes for successes). Examples of implicit stereotypes include implicit race and gender stereotyping.

Application

Being distracted (cognitively taxed) increases implicit cognition. Paying attention to the judgment itself can help reduce the effects of implicit cognition (e.g., affirmative action).