Oppressed Groups Engender Implicit Positivity: Seven Demonstrations Using Novel and Familiar Targets.

Across seven preregistered studies in online adult volunteer samples (N = 5,323), we measured implicit evaluations of social groups following exposure to historical narratives about their oppression. Although the valence of such information is highly negative and its interpretation was left up to participants, implicit evaluations of oppressed groups shifted toward positivity, including in designs involving fictitious, well-known, and even self-relevant targets. The sole deviation from this pattern was observed in an experiment using a vignette about slavery in the United States, in response to which neither White nor Black Americans exhibited any change in implicit race attitudes. In line with propositional perspectives, these findings suggest that implicit evaluations (including, notably, implicit evaluations of well-known and self-relevant social groups) tend to change toward positivity in response to extremely negative information involving past oppression. However, macro-level phenomena, such as public awareness of histories of oppression, can modulate such updating processes.

The project implicit international dataset: Measuring implicit and explicit social group attitudes and stereotypes across 34 countries (2009-2019).

For decades, researchers across the social sciences have sought to document and explain the worldwide variation in social group attitudes (evaluative representations, e.g., young-good/old-bad) and stereotypes (attribute representations, e.g., male-science/female-arts). Indeed, uncovering such country-level variation can provide key insights into questions ranging from how attitudes and stereotypes are clustered across places to why places vary in attitudes and stereotypes (including ecological and social correlates). Here, we introduce the Project Implicit:International (PI:International) dataset that has the potential to propel such research by offering the first cross-country dataset of both implicit (indirectly measured) and explicit (directly measured) attitudes and stereotypes across multiple topics and years. PI:International comprises 2.3 million tests for seven topics (race, sexual orientation, age, body weight, nationality, and skin-tone attitudes, as well as men/women-science/arts stereotypes) using both indirect (Implicit Association Test; IAT) and direct (self-report) measures collected continuously from 2009 to 2019 from 34 countries in each country's native language(s). We show that the IAT data from PI:International have adequate internal consistency (split-half reliability), convergent validity (implicit-explicit correlations), and known groups validity. Given such reliability and validity, we summarize basic descriptive statistics on the overall strength and variability of implicit and explicit attitudes and stereotypes around the world. The PI:International dataset, including both summary data and trial-level data from the IAT, is provided openly to facilitate wide access and novel discoveries on the global nature of implicit and explicit attitudes and stereotypes.

Testing the automaticity features of the affect misattribution procedure: The roles of awareness and intentionality.

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is a measure of implicit evaluations, designed to index the automatic retrieval of evaluative knowledge. The AMP effect consists in participants evaluating neutral target stimuli positively when preceded by positive primes and negatively when preceded by negative primes. After multiple prior tests of intentionality, Hughes et al. (Behav Res Methods 55(4):1558-1586, 2023) examined the role of awareness in the AMP and found that AMP effects were larger when participants indicated that their response was influenced by the prime than when they did not. Here we report seven experiments (six preregistered; N = 2350) in which we vary the methodological features of the AMP to better understand this awareness effect. In Experiments 1-4, we establish variability in the magnitude of the awareness effect in response to variations in the AMP procedure. By introducing further modifications to the AMP procedure, Experiments 5-7 suggest an alternative explanation of the awareness effect, namely that awareness can be the outcome, rather than the cause, of evaluative congruency between primes and responses: Awareness effects emerged even when awareness could not have contributed to AMP effects, including when participants judged influence awareness for third parties or primes were presented post hoc. Finally, increasing the evaluative strength of the primes increased participants' tendency to misattribute AMP effects to the influence of target stimuli. Together, the present findings suggest that AMP effects can create awareness effects rather than vice versa and support the AMP's construct validity as a measure of unintentional evaluations of which participants are also potentially unaware.

Model-free and model-based learning processes in the updating of explicit and implicit evaluations.

Evaluating stimuli along a good-bad dimension is a fundamental computation performed by the human mind. In recent decades, research has documented dissociations and associations between explicit (i.e., self-reported) and implicit (i.e., indirectly measured) forms of evaluations. However, it is unclear whether such dissociations arise from relatively more superficial differences in measurement techniques or from deeper differences in the processes by which explicit and implicit evaluations are acquired and represented. The present project (total N = 2,354) relies on the computationally well-specified distinction between model-based and model-free reinforcement learning to investigate the unique and shared aspects of explicit and implicit evaluations. Study 1 used a revaluation procedure to reveal that, whereas explicit evaluations of novel targets are updated via model-free and model-based processes, implicit evaluations depend on the former but are impervious to the latter. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated the robustness of this effect to (i) the number of stimulus exposures in the revaluation phase and (ii) the deterministic vs. probabilistic nature of initial reinforcement. These findings provide a framework, going beyond traditional dual-process and single-process accounts, to highlight the context-sensitivity and long-term recalcitrance of implicit evaluations as well as variations in their relationship with their explicit counterparts. These results also suggest avenues for designing theoretically guided interventions to produce change in implicit evaluations.

The relationship between implicit intergroup attitudes and beliefs.

Intergroup attitudes (evaluations) are generalized valence attributions to social groups (e.g., white-bad/Asian-good), whereas intergroup beliefs (stereotypes) are specific trait attributions to social groups (e.g., white-dumb/Asian-smart). When explicit (self-report) measures are used, attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social group are often related to each other but can also be dissociated. The present work used three approaches (correlational, experimental, and archival) to conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between implicit (indirectly revealed) intergroup attitudes and beliefs. In study 1 (n = 1,942), we found significant correlations and, in some cases, evidence for redundancy, between Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social groups (mean r = 0.31, 95% confidence interval: [0.24; 0.39]). In study 2 (n = 383), manipulating attitudes via evaluative conditioning produced parallel changes in belief IATs, demonstrating that implicit attitudes can causally drive implicit beliefs when information about the specific semantic trait is absent. In study 3, we used word embeddings derived from a large corpus of online text to show that the relative distance of 22 social groups from positive vs. negative words (reflecting generalized attitudes) was highly correlated with their distance from warm vs. cold, and even competent vs. incompetent, words (reflecting specific beliefs). Overall, these studies provide convergent evidence for tight connections between implicit attitudes and beliefs, suggesting that the dissociations observed using explicit measures may arise uniquely from deliberate judgment processes.

What can the implicit social cognition literature teach us about implicit social cognition?

We highlight several sets of findings from the past decade elucidating the relationship between implicit social cognition and real-world inequality: Studies focusing on practical ramifications of implicit social cognition in applied contexts, the relationship between implicit social cognition and consequential real-world outcomes at the level of individuals and geographic units, and convergence between individual-level and corpus-based measures of implicit bias.

Gender Stereotypes in Natural Language: Word Embeddings Show Robust Consistency Across Child and Adult Language Corpora of More Than 65 Million Words.

Stereotypes are associations between social groups and semantic attributes that are widely shared within societies. The spoken and written language of a society affords a unique way to measure the magnitude and prevalence of these widely shared collective representations. Here, we used word embeddings to systematically quantify gender stereotypes in language corpora that are unprecedented in size (65+ million words) and scope (child and adult conversations, books, movies, TV). Across corpora, gender stereotypes emerged consistently and robustly for both theoretically selected stereotypes (e.g., work-home) and comprehensive lists of more than 600 personality traits and more than 300 occupations. Despite underlying differences across language corpora (e.g., time periods, formats, age groups), results revealed the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes in every corpus. Using gender stereotypes as the focal issue, we unite 19th-century theories of collective representations and 21st-century evidence on implicit social cognition to understand the subtle yet persistent presence of collective representations in language.

Incidental Attitude Formation via the Surveillance Task: A Preregistered Replication of the Olson and Fazio (2001) Study.

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered (N = 1,478 adult participants), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study (Olson & Fazio, 2001). We obtained evidence for a small evaluative-conditioning effect when "aware" participants were excluded using the original criterion-therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence from the surveillance-task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about "unaware" evaluative-conditioning effects.

Children's implicit attitude acquisition: Evaluative statements succeed, repeated pairings fail.

From the earliest ages tested, children and adults show similar overall magnitudes of implicit attitudes toward various social groups. However, such consistency in attitude magnitude may obscure meaningful age-related change in the ways that children (vs. adults) acquire implicit attitudes. This experiment investigated children's implicit attitude acquisition by comparing the separate and joint effects of two learning interventions, previously shown to form implicit attitudes in adults. Children (N = 280, ages 7-11 years) were taught about novel social groups through either evaluative statements (ES; auditorily presented verbal statements such as 'Longfaces are bad, Squarefaces are good'), repeated evaluative pairings (REP; visual pairings of Longface/Squareface group members with valenced images such as a puppy or snake), or a combination of ES+REP. Results showed that children acquired implicit attitudes following ES and ES+REP, with REP providing no additional learning beyond ES alone. Moreover, children did not acquire implicit attitudes in four variations of REP, each designed to facilitate learning by systematically increasing verbal scaffolding to specify (a) the learning goal, (b) the valence of the unconditioned stimuli, and (c) the group categories of the conditioned stimuli. These findings underscore the early-emerging role of verbal statements in children's implicit attitude acquisition, as well as a possible age-related limit in children's acquisition of novel implicit attitudes from repeated pairings.

Introducing the Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS).

We introduce the Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS), an open-access online stimulus set containing 900 color images depicting a broad spectrum of themes, including humans, animals, objects, and scenes, along with normative ratings on two affective dimensions-valence (i.e., the degree of positive or negative affective response that the image evokes) and arousal (i.e., the intensity of the affective response that the image evokes). The OASIS images were collected from online sources, and valence and arousal ratings were obtained in an online study (total N = 822). The valence and arousal ratings covered much of the circumplex space and were highly reliable and consistent across gender groups. OASIS has four advantages: (a) the stimulus set contains a large number of images in four categories; (b) the data were collected in 2015, and thus OASIS features more current images and reflects more current ratings of valence and arousal than do existing stimulus sets; (c) the OASIS database affords users the ability to interactively explore images by category and ratings; and, most critically, (d) OASIS allows for free use of the images in online and offline research studies, as they are not subject to the copyright restrictions that apply to the International Affective Picture System. The OASIS images, along with normative valence and arousal ratings, are available for download from www.benedekkurdi.com/#oasis or https://db.tt/yYTZYCga .

Responsible data sharing: Identifying and remedying possible re-identification of human participants.

Open data collected from research participants creates a tension between scholarly values of transparency and sharing, on the one hand, and privacy and security, on the other hand. A common solution is to make data sets anonymous by removing personally identifying information (e.g., names or worker IDs) before sharing. However, ostensibly anonymized data sets may be at risk of re-identification if they include demographic information. In the present article, we provide researchers with broadly applicable guidance and tangible tools so that they can engage in open science practices without jeopardizing participants' privacy. Specifically, we (a) review current privacy standards, (b) describe computer science data protection frameworks and their adaptability to the social sciences, (c) provide practical guidance for assessing and addressing re-identification risk, (d) introduce two open-source algorithms developed for psychological scientists-MinBlur and MinBlurLite-to increase privacy while maintaining the integrity of open data, and (e) highlight aspects of ethical data sharing that require further attention. Ultimately, the risk of re-identification should not dissuade engagement with open science practices. Instead, technical innovations should be developed and harnessed so that science can be as open as possible to promote transparency and sharing and as closed as necessary to maintain privacy and security. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Awareness of implicit attitudes: Large-scale investigations of mechanism and scope.

People can predict their scores on the Implicit Association Test with remarkable accuracy, challenging the traditional notion that implicit attitudes are inaccessible to introspection and suggesting that people might be aware of these attitudes. Yet, major open questions about the mechanism and scope of these predictions remain, making their implications unclear. Notably, people may be inferring their attitudes from externally observable cues (e.g., in the simplest case, their demographic information) rather than accessing them directly. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that, in past work, predictions have been obtained only for a small set of targets, attitudes toward which are demonstrably possible to infer. Here, in an adversarial collaboration with eight preregistered studies (N = 8,011), we interrogate implicit attitude awareness using more stringent tests. We demonstrate that people can predict their implicit attitudes (a) across a broad range of targets (many of which are plausibly difficult to infer without introspection), (b) far more accurately than third-party observers can based on demographic information, and (c) with similar accuracy across two different widely used implicit measures. On the other hand, predictive accuracy (a) varied widely across individuals and attitude targets and (b) was partially explained by inference over nonintrospective cues such as demographic variables and explicit attitudes; moreover, (c) explicit attitudes explained considerably larger portions of variance in predictions than implicit attitudes did. Taken together, these findings suggest that successful predictions of one's implicit attitudes may emerge from multiple mechanisms, including inference over nonintrospective cues and genuine introspective access. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Disabled and Romani passengers face similar levels of discrimination but different levels of open hostility in the sharing economy.

This multimethod project investigates discrimination against members of two populous minority groups in the European Union: the Roma (numbering 6 million) and the disabled (numbering 100 million) on a leading Hungarian carpooling platform. In a field experiment, 1005 ride requests were sent to drivers, with passenger group membership (control, disabled, Roma) manipulated between participants. Widespread discrimination against both groups was apparent in significantly lower approval rates for disabled (56%) and Roma passengers (52%) relative to control (70%). Mechanisms driving anti-disabled and anti-Roma discrimination were probed using an experimental manipulation, natural language processing analysis of driver-passenger interactions, and an online survey (N = 398). Individuating information in the form of reviews did not mitigate unequal treatment, thus providing evidence against statistical (stereotype-based) discrimination. Militating against taste-based (attitudinal) discrimination, respondents reported negative attitudes toward Roma passengers but positive attitudes toward disabled passengers. Moreover, despite equivalent approval rates, disabled passengers were more likely to receive a response from drivers and received more polite responses than Roma passengers did. Overall, the observed patterns are most readily explained by intergroup emotions: Contempt toward Roma passengers likely engenders both passive and active harm, whereas pity toward disabled passengers likely engenders passive harm and active facilitation.

A 3D framework of implicit attitude change.

According to early theories, implicit (automatic) social attitudes are difficult if not impossible to change. Although this view has recently been challenged by research relying on experimental, developmental, and cultural approaches, relevant work remains siloed across research communities. As such, the time is ripe to systematize and integrate disparate (and seemingly contradictory) findings and to identify gaps in existing knowledge. To this end, we introduce a 3D framework classifying research on implicit attitude change by levels of analysis (individual vs. collective), sources of change (experimental, ontogenetic, and cultural), and timescales (short term vs. long term). This 3D framework highlights where evidence for implicit attitude change is more versus less well established and pinpoints directions for future research, including at the intersection of fields.

How do explicit and implicit evaluations shift? A preregistered meta-analysis of the effects of co-occurrence and relational information.

Based on 660 effect sizes obtained from 23,255 adult participants across 51 reports of experimental studies, this meta-analysis investigates whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (indirectly revealed) evaluations reflect relational information (how stimuli are related to each other) over and above co-occurrence information (the fact that stimuli have been paired with each other). Using a mixed-effects metaregression, relational information was found to dominate over contradictory co-occurrence information in shifting both explicit (mean Hedges' g = 0.97, 95% CI [0.89, 1.05], 95% PI [0.24, 1.70]) and implicit evaluations (g = 0.27, 95% CI [0.19, 0.35], 95% PI [-0.46, 1.00]). However, considerable heterogeneity in relational effects on implicit evaluation made moderator analyses necessary. Implicit evaluations were particularly sensitive to relational information (a) in between-participant (rather than within-participant) designs; when (b) co-occurrence information was held constant (rather than manipulated); (c) targets were novel (rather than known); implicit evaluations were measured (d) first (rather than last) and (e) using an affect misattribution procedure (rather than an Implicit Association Test or evaluative priming task); and (f) relational and co-occurrence information were presented in temporal proximity (rather than far apart in time). Overall, the present findings suggest that both implicit and explicit evaluations emerge from a combination of co-occurrence information and relational information, with relational information usually playing the dominant role. Critically, variability in these effects highlights a need to refocus attention from existence proof demonstrations toward theoretical and empirical work on the determinants and boundary conditions of the influences of co-occurrence and relational information on explicit and implicit evaluations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

(when) do counterattitudinal exemplars shift implicit racial evaluations? Replications and extensions of Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001).

Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) demonstrated that exposure to positive Black exemplars (e.g., Colin Powell) and negative White exemplars (e.g., Jeffrey Dahmer) can reduce implicit pro-White/anti-Black evaluations, as measured by an Implicit Association Test. Here, we report seven preregistered online experiments conducted with volunteer U.S. participants (N = 6,953) that sought to replicate and probe the boundary conditions of this finding. Contrary to expectations, we found no shift in implicit racial evaluations in two close replication attempts (Experiments 1-2). Experiments 3-4 ruled out the possibility of insufficiently strong exemplar valence and subtyping as explanations for the failures to replicate. In Experiment 5, implicit racial evaluations did exhibit malleability in response to two different procedures relying on repeated evaluative pairings and evaluative statements, suggesting that they are capable of change. With insight from these studies, Experiments 6-7 were mounted with modifications to the Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) procedure. Significant reductions in implicit pro-White/anti-Black evaluations were now observed when race, valence, and the contingency between the two were highlighted. In addition, across all experiments, the magnitude of shift in implicit racial evaluations was significantly predicted by participants' ability to recall the Black-positive and White-negative contingencies experienced during the exemplar exposure task. Together, these data suggest that exposure to counterattitudinal exemplars can shift implicit racial evaluations toward neutrality, but such malleability strongly depends on contingency awareness. We discuss implications for social cognitive theory, theoretically informed debiasing interventions, and different paths toward resolving initial replication failures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The role of causal structure in implicit evaluation.

Causal relationships, unlike mere co-occurrence, allow humans to obtain rewards and avoid punishments by intervening on their environment. Accordingly, explicit (controlled) evaluations of stimuli encountered in the environment are known to be sensitive to causal relationships above and beyond mere co-occurrence. In this project, we conduct stringent tests of whether implicit (automatic) evaluation also reflects causal relationships and begin to probe the representational mechanisms underlying such sensitivity. Participants (N = 4836) observed causal events during which two stimuli were equally contingent with positive or negative outcomes but only one of them was causally responsible for these outcomes. Across 6 studies, varying in design and amount of verbal scaffolding provided, differences in causal status consistently guided not only explicit measures of evaluation (Likert and slider scales; Bayes Factor meta-analysis: Cohen's d = 0.28, BF10 > 1046) but also their implicit counterparts (Implicit Association Tests; Bayes Factor meta-analysis: Cohen's d = 0.22, BF10 > 1029). However, unlike their explicit counterparts, implicit evaluations were not sensitive to causal relationships that had to be flexibly derived by combining disparate past experiences. Taken together, these studies suggest that implicit evaluations are sensitive to causal information. Such sensitivity seems to be mediated via precompiled, causally informed value representations rather than online computations over a causal model.

Problems and Mysteries of the Many Languages of Thought.

"What is the structure of thought?" is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems.

Sensitivity of implicit evaluations to accurate and erroneous propositional inferences.

Explicit (directly measured) evaluations are widely assumed to be sensitive to logical structure. However, whether implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are uniquely sensitive to co-occurrence information or can also reflect logical structure has been a matter of theoretical debate. To test these competing ideas, participants (N = 3928) completed a learning phase consisting of a series of two-step trials. In step 1, one or more conditional statements (A â†’ B) containing novel targets co-occurring with valenced adjectives (e.g., "if you see a blue square, Ibbonif is sincere") were presented. In step 2, a disambiguating stimulus, e.g., blue square (A) or gray blob (¬A) was revealed. Co-occurrence information, disambiguating stimuli, or both were varied between conditions to enable investigating the unique and joint effects of each. Across studies, the combination of conditional statements and disambiguating stimuli licensed different normatively accurate inferences. In Study 1, participants were prompted to use modus ponens (inferring B from A â†’ B and A). In Studies 2-4, the information did not license accurate inferences, but some participants made inferential errors: affirming the consequent (inferring A from A â†’ B and B; Study 2) or denying the antecedent (inferring ¬B from A â†’ B and ¬A; Studies 3A, 3B, and 4). Bayesian modeling using ordinal constraints on condition means yielded consistent evidence for the sensitivity of both explicit (self-report) and implicit (IAT and AMP) evaluations to the (correctly or erroneously) inferred truth value of propositions. Together, these data suggest that implicit evaluations, similar to their explicit counterparts, can reflect logical structure.

Specificity and incremental predictive validity of implicit attitudes: studies of a race-based phenotype.

Four studies involving 2552 White American participants were conducted to investigate bias based on the race-based phenotype of hair texture. Specifically, we probed the existence and magnitude of bias in favor of Eurocentric (straight) over Afrocentric (curly) hair and its specificity in predicting responses to a legal decision involving the phenotype. Study 1 revealed an implicit preference, measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT), favoring Eurocentric over Afrocentric hair texture among White Americans. This effect was not reducible to a Black/White implicit race attitude nor to mere perceptual preference favoring straight over curly hair. In Study 2, the phenotype (hair) IAT significantly and uniquely predicted expressions of support in response to an actual legal case that involved discrimination on the basis of Afrocentric hair texture. Beyond replicating this result, Studies 3 and 4 (the latter preregistered) provided further, and even more stringent, evidence for incremental predictive validity: in both studies, the phenotype IAT was associated with support for a Black plaintiff above and beyond the effects of two parallel explicit scales and, additionally, a race attitude IAT. Overall, these studies support the idea that race bias may be uniquely detected by examining implicit attitudes elicited by group-based phenotypicality, such as hair texture. Moreover, the present results inform theoretical investigations of the correspondence principle in the context of implicit social cognition: they suggest that tailoring IATs to index specific aspects of an attitude object (e.g., by decomposition of phenotypes) can improve prediction of intergroup behavior.