Question

What is the difference between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes? Give an example of each.

Short answer

Explicit attitudes are conscious beliefs or feelings about an object, person, or situation that can be easily expressed, like a love for classical music. Implicit attitudes are unconscious and automatic reactions that may not align with one's declared beliefs, such as unintentional biases towards different races detected through reaction time tests.

Step-by-step solution

Identifying Explicit Attitudes

Explicit attitudes are those that an individual is consciously aware of and can easily report. They are deliberate and controllable feelings and beliefs that a person has about an object, person, or situation. For example, a person can express an explicit attitude by stating 'I love classical music,' which reflects a clear and controlled preference.

Identifying Implicit Attitudes

Implicit attitudes, in contrast, are unconscious beliefs or feelings that a person may not be aware of or cannot directly report. They are automatic reactions, which can often be different from one's stated explicit attitude. An example of an implicit attitude might be a person who claims to treat all races equally (explicit attitude), but shows unconscious bias in a test that measures reaction times to words or images associated with different races (implicit attitude).

Comparison and Contrast

The main difference between explicit and implicit attitudes is that explicit attitudes are known and expressed by the individual, whereas implicit attitudes are unspoken, perhaps even unconscious beliefs that might influence behavior in ways not aligned with one's declared beliefs. It's important to consider that there might be a discrepancy between what people say they believe or feel and what their implicit attitudes reveal.

Key concepts

Social Psychology

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.
Understanding how and why individuals act and react in a social context allows us to explore the complex interactions between individual psychology and society. Within this field, attitudes play a significant role as they shape and are shaped by social experiences.
Research in social psychology often involves studying attitudes, both explicit and implicit, and how they can predict behavior in social contexts.

Attitudes

Attitudes are the evaluations we hold about particular issues, people, objects, or events.
These evaluations can be positive, negative, or neutral, and they are formed through various experiences and influences. Attitudes have three components: cognitive (what we believe), affective (what we feel), and behavioral (how we are inclined to act).
Explicit attitudes are consciously held and can be verbally expressed, whereas implicit attitudes operate on a subconscious level and can influence our behavior without us being fully aware of them.

Unconscious Bias

Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside of their conscious awareness.
Although everyone possesses unconscious biases, they can be at odds with a person's conscious values. Recognizing and mitigating these biases is crucial, particularly in diverse social settings or institutions where fairness and equality are vital.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one tool that researchers use to detect the presence of unconscious biases by measuring automatic associations between concepts and evaluations.

Self-report

Self-report methods are a common way of gathering data on people's explicit attitudes.
This involves individuals reporting their thoughts, feelings, or behaviors through questionnaires, interviews, or surveys. Self-report is valuable because it gives direct access to a person's perceptions and self-assessment.
However, self-report data can be limited by factors such as social desirability bias, where respondents may give answers they believe are more socially acceptable rather than being truthful.

Automatic Reactions

Automatic reactions are quick, unconscious responses to certain stimuli that happen without deliberate thought.
They are often rooted in implicit attitudes and can influence behavior in subtle ways. Automatic reactions can be revealed through techniques like the IAT, which assesses how quickly a person associates different concepts with one another.
Understanding these automatic responses can help explain why there is sometimes a disconnect between what people say (explicit attitudes) and what they do (implicit attitudes).