Evaluation is a Dynamic Process : Moving Beyond Dual System Models

Over the past few decades, dual attitude ⁄ process ⁄ system models have emerged as the dominant framework for understanding a wide range of psychological phenomena. Most of these models characterize the unconscious and conscious mind as being built from discrete processes or systems: one that is reflexive, automatic, fast, affective, associative, and primitive, and a second that is deliberative, controlled, slow, cognitive, propositional, and more uniquely human. Although these models serve as a useful heuristic for characterizing the human mind, recent developments in social and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the human evaluative system, like most of cognition, is widely distributed and highly dynamic. Integrating these advances with current attitude theories, we review how the recently proposed Iterative Reprocessing Model can account for apparent dual systems as well as discrepancies between traditional dual system models and recent research revealing the dynamic nature of evaluation. Furthermore, we describe important implications this dynamical system approach has for various social psychological domains. For nearly a century, psychologists have sought to understand the unconscious and conscious processes that allow people to evaluate their surroundings (Allport, 1935; Freud, 1930). Building on a model of the human mind rooted in classic Greek philosophy (Annas, 2001), many contemporary psychologists have characterized the mind as possessing discrete processes or systems: one that is evolutionarily older, reflexive, automatic, fast, affective, associative, and the other that is more uniquely human, deliberative, controlled, slow, cognitive, and propositional (see Figure 1). These dual process or system models have been highly influential throughout psychology for the past three decades (Chaiken & Trope, 1999). Indeed, a dual system model of the human mind permeates research in a wide range of psychological domains, such as attitudes and persuasion (Chaiken, 1980; Fazio, 1990; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986; Rydell & McConnell, 2006; Wilson, Samuel, & Schooler, 2000), stereotypes and prejudice (Crandall & Eshleman, 2003; Devine, 1989; Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986; Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995), person perception (Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000), self-regulation (Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996; Freud, 1930; Hofmann, Friese, & Strack, 2009; Strack & Deutsch, 2004), moral cognition (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Haidt, 2001), learning and memory (Smith & DeCoster, 2000; Sun, 2002), and decision-making (Kahneman, 2003; Sloman, 1996). Although dual system models provide generative frameworks for understanding a wide range of psychological phenomenon, recent developments in social and affective neuroscience suggest that the human evaluative system, like most of cognition, is widely distributed and highly dynamic (e.g., Ferguson & Wojnowicz, 2011; Freeman & Ambady, Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/6 (2012): 438–454, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00438.x a 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2011; Scherer, 2009). Integrating these advances with current attitude theories, we review how the recently proposed Iterative Reprocessing Model (Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007; Cunningham, Zelazo, Packer, & Van Bavel, 2007) can account for apparent dual systems as well as discrepancies between traditional dual system models and recent research revealing the dynamic nature of evaluation. The model also address why the nature of evaluative processing differs across people (e.g., Cunningham, Raye, & Johnson, 2005; Park, Van Bavel, Vasey, & Thayer, forthcoming). Although we focus primarily on dual models of attitudes and evaluation due to space constraints, we believe the premises of our dynamic model can be generalized to other domains where dual system models of typically invoked (Chaiken & Trope, 1999), including social cognition, self-regulation, prejudice and stereotyping, and moral cognition. Therefore, we very briefly discuss the implications of our model for these other domains in the final section of this paper and encourage interested readers to read our more extensive treatment of these issues in the domain of stereotypes and prejudice (Cunningham & Van Bavel, 2009a; Van Bavel & Cunningham, 2011) and emotion (Cunningham & Van Bavel, 2009b; Kirkland & Cunningham, 2011, forthcoming). Attitudes and evaluation Attitudes are one of the most central constructs in social psychology, yet there has been considerable debate regarding the most fundamental aspects of attitudes (Fazio, 2007; Schwarz & Bohner, 2001). Allport (1935) defined an attitude as ‘‘a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related’’ (p. 810). Throughout the history of attitude research, theorists and researchers have attempted to provide a complete yet parsimonious definition of this construct. Wellknown examples include the one-component perspective (Thurstone, 1928), the tripartite model (Affective, Behavior, Cognition; Katz & Stotland, 1959; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960), and more recently, a host of dual attitudes (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Rydell & McConnell, 2006; Wilson et al., 2000) and dual process models (e.g., Chaiken, 1980; Fazio, 1990; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). It is widely assumed that attitudes are stored associations between objects and their evaluations, which can be accessed from memory very quickly with little conscious effort Figure 1 Illustrative example of the process and content of a dual system model (cited in Kahneman, 2003, p. 698). Evaluation is a Dynamic Process 439 a 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/6 (2012): 438–454, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00438.x (Fazio, 2001; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986; but see Schwarz, 2007). For example, people categorize positive and negative words more quickly when these words are preceded by a similarly valenced stimuli, suggesting that attitudes are automatically activated by the mere presence of the attitude object in the environment (Fazio et al., 1986). Moreover, people may have access to evaluative information about stimuli prior to their semantic content (Bargh, Litt, Pratto, & Spielman, 1989; but see Storbeck & Clore, 2007). Such research has led to the conclusion that the initial evaluative classification of stimuli as good or bad can be activated automatically and guide the perceiver’s interpretation of his or her environment (Houston & Fazio, 1989; Smith, Fazio, & Cejka, 1996). Dual attitudes and dual process models of attitudes The recent development of a wide variety of implicit attitude measures (Petty, Fazio, & Briñol, 2009; Wittenbrink & Schwarz, 2007), including measures of human physiology (Cunningham, Packer, Kesek, & Van Bavel, 2009), has fueled an explosion of research on dual attitude ⁄process ⁄ system models of attitudes and evaluations (see Table 1). Most of these models infer dual process architecture from observable dissociations between implicit and explicit measures of behavior (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002; McConnell & Leibold, 2001; Rydell & McConnell, 2006). Although many dual models generally share a common set of assumptions about the human mind, the specific features of each model differ. Therefore, we propose a rough taxonomy to characterize different classes of these models. ‘‘Dual attitudes models’’ tend to dichotomize the representations of attitudes into distinct automatic versus controlled constructs (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Rydell & McConnell, 2006; Wilson et al., 2000). In contrast, ‘‘dual process models’’ tend to dichotomize the processing of attitudinal representations into automatic versus controlled processes. There is considerable debate over whether these two types of processes are independent or communicate with one another (i.e., information from one system is available to the other system) (Fazio, 1990; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988; Petty, Brinol, & DeMarree, 2007). In the latter case, interdependent dual process models have generally been proposed to operate in a corrective fashion, such that ‘‘controlled’’ processes can influence otherwise ‘‘automatic’’ responses (e.g., Wegener & Petty, 1997). Although dual attitudes models likely require dual processes to integrate different attitudinal representations into evaluations and behaviors, dual process models are less likely to require the assumption of dual attitude representations (e.g., Fazio, 1990). For the purpose of clarity, we use ‘‘dual system models’’ to capture models that assume dual attitudes and processes that do not interact (e.g., Rydell & McConnell, 2006; Wilson et al., 2000). There are, of course, many ways to hook up a dual system (see Gilbert, 1999 for a discussion). A complete discussion of all possible dual models and interconnections between these systems is beyond the scope of this article. Therefore, we focus on several core premises that many models have in common. Likewise, we focus on the core premises from our own model – rather than an exhaustive discussion (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2007) – in order to communicate key similarities and differences between dual models and our proposed dynamic model. Furthermore, we recognize that dual models and our proposed dynamic model do not exhaust all types of models of attitudes and evaluation – some extant models do include more than two processes (e.g., Beer, Knight, & D’Esposito, 2006; Conrey, Sherman, Gawronski, Hugenberg, & Groom, 2005) and many allow for interactive processes that operate in a post hoc, corrective fashion (e.g., Chen & Chaiken, 1999; Gawronski & 440 Evaluation is a Dynamic Process a 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/6 (2012):