Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Implicit Cognitive Processes and Voting

Implicit cognitive processes are automatic and spontaneous processes of thought, of which individuals can at times be unaware. Since the beginning of the 21st century, based on the development of new instruments for the measurement of implicit processes, it has been shown that their investigation is useful for understanding various aspects of human behavior, including voting. This entry describes research on the use of implicit measures in prediction of voting behavior and considers the question of how implicit cognition might influence voting.

Implicit Cognitive Processes

Implicit cognition is a major theme in all fields of psychology since the last decades of the 20th century. Implicit cognition is typically understood in contrast to its opposite, explicit cognition. Explicit cognition refers to those processes of thought that occur in a reflexive, controlled, and intentional way, that require cognitive effort, and whose contents are characterized by subjective awareness. For instance, when individuals are asked their opinion about the current president of the United States, they may reflect thoroughly about this person, retrieve relevant knowledge from their memory, and provide their response based on this knowledge. Explicit cognitive contents are typically measured through self-report techniques: interviews and questionnaires.

Implicit cognitive processes, in contrast, lack one or more elements that characterize explicit cognition: they are spontaneous and effortless, take place outside of people’s awareness, or are not controlled.

In order to be considered implicit, a mental process has to possess one or more of these characteristics. For example, for some individuals, the simple fact of reading the name of the current president of the United States may be sufficient to automatically trigger a positive or negative feeling, even when they have not formed any intention to provide an evaluation. Implicit cognition is investigated through procedures designed to capture automatic responses, often based on the measurement of reaction times, like the Implicit Association Test. These procedures allow the inference of cognitive contents based on the speed with which individuals complete a set of tasks or by other aspects of performance without relying on people’s willingness and ability for introspection.

Empirical research has shown that many aspects of human behavior are influenced by implicit cognition. Measures of implicit cognition have proven especially useful to investigate socially sensitive issues, such as prejudice or the self-concept, for which self-reports are often distorted by impression management and social desirability concerns.

Implicit Cognition and Political Judgment

Based on the observation that political thinking is often characterized by a strong influence of affect, a hot cognition hypothesis has been proposed, according to which all sociopolitical concepts (e.g., political leaders, issues, social groups, etc.) that have been evaluated in the past are affectively laden, and this affect is stored in memory, directly linked to the concepts. When these same sociopolitical concepts come to mind again, for instance because the individual is reminded of them, the associated affect also becomes automatically active and colors subsequent cognitive processing, causing motivated reasoning. This process has also been referred to as the likability heuristic or how-do-I-feel heuristic.

Milton Lodge and Charles S. Taber provided empirical support for the hot cognition hypothesis. They presented participants in their experiment with pairs of words, presented one after the other in what is called a priming paradigm. The first word of the pair was a political concept such as “guns.” The second word was an unambiguously positive word, like “rainbow,” or a negative one, like “toothache.” Participants had to ignore the first word and categorize as fast as possible the second one by pressing one of two buttons labeled + and − to indicate whether it had a positive or negative meaning. Importantly, they were requested neither to evaluate the first word nor to indicate whether it was related to the second one. Results were consistent with the hot cognition hypothesis: reactions to both positive and negative words were faster when they were preceded by affectively congruent political concepts (e.g., Hitler-toothache) as compared with when they were preceded by incongruent concepts (e.g., peace-toothache), despite the fact that participants were not requested to evaluate them. This indicates that when participants saw the first word of each couple, they activated in their mind the corresponding affect automatically, and it colored the processing of the second word, facilitating its categorization when it was affectively consistent and inhibiting it when it was affectively inconsistent.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution