Implicit and explicit attitudes respond differently to increasing amounts of counterattitudinal information y

This research examined the processes by which explicit and implicit attitudes changed to systematically differing levels of counterattitudinal (CA) information. Explicit attitudes changed quickly in response to relatively small amounts of CA information, reflecting rule-based reasoning. On the other hand, implicit attitudes changed more slowly in the face of CA information, reflecting the progressive accretion of evaluation-attitude object pairings. Thus, explicit attitudes were extremely malleable and changed quickly when CA information was presented, however, implicit attitudes revealed a slow, linear change trajectory resulting from the on-going accrual of information about the attitude object. Implications for the processes underlying implicit and explicit attitudes are discussed. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Understanding how people respond to counterattitudinal (CA) information has a long tradition in social psychological research on attitude change (e.g., Petty & Wegener, 1998), prejudice reduction (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaernter, 2000), and person memory (e.g., Srull & Wyer, 1989). Although many established models account for how people respond to CA information (i.e., information inconsistent with the valence of the initial information about a target), most of this research is based on participants’ explicit, controllable reports of their attitudes. However, recent attitudes work has made a distinction between implicit attitudes (i.e., attitudes for which people do not initially have conscious access and for which activation cannot be controlled) and explicit attitudes (i.e., attitudes that people can report and for which expression can be consciously controlled). Additionally, a great deal of European Journal of Social Psychology Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 37, 867–878 (2007) Published online 18 September 2006 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.393 *Correspondence to: Dr Robert J. Rydell, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660, USA. E-mail: rydell@psych.ucsb.edu yPortions of this work were submitted by Robert J. Rydell in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Miami University. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 24 February 2006 Accepted 26 June 2006 research has shown that implicit and explicit attitudes predict different types of behaviors, with implicit attitudes predicting spontaneous, non-verbal behaviors and judgments (e.g., Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003; McConnell & Leibold, 2001; Rydell & McConnell, in press), and explicit behaviors predicting controlled judgments and responses (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997). Not only may implicit and explicit attitudes lead to and predict different outcomes (Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000), but it has been suggested that they may also change due to different processes (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). The current work expands on recent dual-process models of explicit and implicit attitudes, with a particular emphasis on how implicit and explicit attitudes can be changed by different processes in the face of CA information. Although the processes underlying explicit attitude change are relatively well understood (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Petty & Wegener, 1998), the processes underlying implicit attitude change are not (Devine, 2001; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Gregg, Seibt, & Banaji, 2006). Indeed, researchers have just begun to focus attention on how implicit attitudes are formed, function, and change (Fazio & Olson, 2003). Most research showing implicit attitude change has relied on modifying the social context or the target-relevant stimuli to temporarily change the accessibility of knowledge associated with a stigmatized group in memory (e.g., Barden, Maddux, Petty, & Brewer, 2004; Blair, 2002; Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). On the other hand, and more relevant to the present concerns, other research has shown that implicit attitudes seem quite resilient to change, unlike explicit attitudes (e.g., Gregg et al., 2006; Petty, Tormala, Briñol, & Jarvis, 2006). For example, Petty et al. showed that when people change their implicit and explicit attitudes (e.g., learning that a person conditioned to be positive is dissimilar to you) they associated uncertainty with the attitude object. This uncertainty was due to the inconsistency in valence between their initial attitudes and their changed attitudes, indicating that the initial attitude was still exerting impact on attitude-relevant processes. Also, Gregg et al. showed that people could easily form implicit and explicit attitudes toward two novel but competing groups that differed in valence. Although explicit attitudes did change in response to CA information (whether imagined or provided), implicit attitudes did not. This research showed that implicit attitudes, once formed, were relatively impervious to new information. The findings of Gregg et al. have added to the considerable confusion about how implicit attitudes change in the wake of new information. Because implicit evaluations seem to be malleable in some circumstances and basic tenants of learning state that evaluations should change when enough attitude inconsistent information is presented (McClelland, McNaughton, & O’Reilly, 1995; Olson & Fazio, 2001), how implicit attitudes respond to CA information is still unclear. Therefore, the current research addresses how implicit attitudes respond to systematically different amounts of CA information. In particular, this research explored attitude change involving a novel attitude object to examine the basic processes underlying implicit and explicit attitudes in the absence of any pre-existing or overarching expectancies about the target. Our approach to tackling the question of how implicit attitude change is realized draws heavily on dual-process and memory models that account for how different types of information processing affect the integration of new information (McClelland et al., 1995; Sloman, 1996; Smith & DeCoster, 2000). Specifically, we differentiate between two systems of evaluation that are based on different modes of processing which allow for (a) the utilization of evaluations that are built up over time and (b) those that are responsive to small amounts of evaluation inconsistent information (McClelland et al., 1995). The first system of evaluation is the slow-learning system, which operates by gradually accruing attitude object-evaluation associations. This system is known as the slow-learning system because it takes a considerable number of paired associations (based on similarity and temporal contiguity) for knowledge to develop or change. If change occurs in this system, it occurs incrementally. In contrast, Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 37, 867–878 (2007) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp 868 Robert J. Rydell et al.