Implicit Attitudes

Attitudes provide summary assessments that assist in decisions about how to interact with the world. An attitude is an association between a concept and an evaluation—positive or negative, favorable or unfavorable, desirable or undesirable. Attitudes help guide people's judgment and behavior. Should I approach the bear with the big claws or run away? Should I eat this cactus? Do I like members of that group? In short, is this thing good or bad?

One way that attitudes can be measured is by asking people to report their feelings. For example, to find out someone's attitude toward ice cream, we might ask [Page 465]the person to rate his or her attitude on a response scale ranging from 1 (dislike ice cream very much) to 8 (like ice cream very much). Alternatively, attitudes might be inferred indirectly, based on performance on a task designed to measure associations between concepts and evaluations. For example, imagine a deck of playing cards that, instead of four suits, had examples of flowers and insects, such as tulip and beetle, and words with good or bad meaning, such as wonderful and horrible. Someone with positive associations with flowers and negative associations with insects would probably sort these cards into two piles faster if “flowers” and “good” things have to go in one pile (and “insects” and “bad” words in the other), compared to sorting “flowers” and “bad” things into one pile (and “insects” and “good” things in the other). The ease of putting flowers and insects with good things compared to bad things is an indirect indication of attitudes. This example describes the logic of the Implicit Association Test.

The two ways of measuring attitudes (described in the previous paragraph) are quite different. One requires that people self-assess their feelings and then provide a rating that summarizes the feeling (I like ice cream, “6”). The other does not require any direct thought about how one feels. Instead, a respondent sorts concepts as quickly as possible, and attitudes are inferred based on the performance. These two types of measurement approaches are interpreted to reflect different types of attitudes—explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes.