Implicit Attitude Theory And Experimental Research

Attitude has been a centra] concept in social psychology throughout its history. In the past 20 years, Social psychologists have witnessed an important shift. Distinguishing automatic activation from controlled and intentional search for memory contents, this work leaves no doubt that attitude may indeed be activated spontaneously from memory, without the perceiver's intent, merely triggered by express to a relevant stimulus cues in the environment. Such automatic activation occurs quickly and uncontrollable, and requires only very limited cognitive resources. Moreover, Social psychologists have invested a great deal of energy into developing techniques to assess-attrtude. For example, the current researchers focus mainly on the most recent of these techniques, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine the content of implicit attitude. Using the IAT,- the current work explores the process of implicit attitude formation, phenomenon of Ambivalence of Implicit Attitudes (A1A), and the impossible moderators of the relationship between-implicit and explicit attitude.The dissertation consists of a series of studies. The conclusions are showed in detail as following:An accumulation of empirical research has shown that majorities of attitude are learned. Until recently, however, the nature of underlying mechanism and processes behind the development of attitude bas been relatively neglected. Present studies (study 1 and 2) are to explore the acquisition of attitude through associative learning or conditioning. The associative transfer of valence is commonlyTeferred to as evaluative conditioning (EC), which refers to changes in the liking of a stimulus that resuh from pairing that stimulus with other positive or negative stimuli. Study 1 explores the formation process of implicit attitude within the subliminal EC paradigm, a form of EC paradigm in which UCS are presented subliminally. The significant evaluative learning effect is observed in the study 1 using SPT. The result indicates that after repeated pairing, the attitude object takes on the valence of the UCS: the neutral CS paired with positive words (UCS) is evaluated more positively, and the neutral CS paired with negative words (UCS) is evaluated more negatively.The control of prejudice may require the development of effective intervene strategies. Study 2 is to explore the possibility of aiding others in successful elimination of prejudice adopting ECparadigm. Attitude can be formed through evaluative conditioning, so it's possible to apply this knowledge to reduce prejudice. The results of study 2 show that attitudes toward male/female are affected by evaluative conditioning. Although subjects evaluate male more positively than female in the implicit measurement and explicit measurement, the degree of prejudice is reduced by evaluative conditioning. The current work argues that a thoughtful examination the potential mechanism of EC may be vital for the attenuation or elimination of prejudice.Noting the theoretical importance of understanding the essence of (implicit) attitude, study 3 is to explore a new phenomenon - Ambivalence of Implicit Attitudes (AIA). The ALA refers to the phenomenon that individual holds simultaneous positive and negative implicit attitudes towards the same social objects, In study 3, Subjects showed gender bias toward female, and age bias toward .elder as has been found in previous research. Interestingly, subjects evaluated the male elder mprepositively than the female younger based on the gender dimension, but when they base their judgment on the age dimension, they showed positive evaluation toward female younger. The current work demonstrates that subjects can hold positive and negative attitudes toward the female younger, and also provides insights for researchers considering the essence of (implicit) attitude. There are two contrasting portrayals of attitude. Traditionally attitudes were viewed as stable evaluation stored in memory and persist over time. In stead of viewing attitudes as stored evaluation, some Te...