Prediction Effects Of Implicit Attitudes Toward Temptations On The Impulsive Behaviors

In our daily lives, we are all constantly confronted with different kinds of temptations, such as delicious foods, exquisite commodities and even attractive opposite sex. While, how to deal with those temptations, people always behave very differently. As we can see, there’re some people who are good at self-control, however, there’re some other people who always indulge in their impulses when facing the same temptation. In the end, what are the key factors that influence people’s different impulsive behaviors?Recently, dual-process theory has been applied to studies of impulsive/self-control behaviors, together with the development of implicit attitude measurements which provide temptation studies more experimental evidence. Some social psychologists suggest that explicitly measured attitudes are particularly valuable for the prediction of deliberate, controlled behavior, implicitly measured attitudes, on the other hand, are assumed to be more important for the prediction of less controlled, more impulsive behavior.The present research is based on the framework of this dual-process theory, mainly concerning about people’s explicit and implicit attitudes towards temptations, and how implicit measured attitude can be used to predict following impulsive behaviors, meanwhile we also included trait impulsivity as a factor which might influence people’s impulsive differences in our experiment design. Experiment1aims at exploring whether there’s correlation between implicit attitudestowards temptations and impulsive behaviors, using a simple and direct way. We used Affect Misattribution Procedure(AMP) and Orientation Stroop task as experiment methods to reveal implicit attitudes and impulsive behaviors respectively, pictures as simulation. In Experiment2we introduced explicit attitude, discrepancies between implicit and explicit attitude, and trait impulsivity as independent variables which could be factors influencing the impulsive behaviors. Participants accomplished Orientation Stroop (impulsive behaviors), Implicit Attitude Test (implicit attitude), Likert5point grade scale (explicit attitude), Barrat Impulsiveness Scale-11(trait impulsivity) and personality information page successively.Results as following:(1) Participants indeed showed positive implicit attitudes towards temptations, but when asked explicitly, they tended to give negative evaluations. This means that there are significant discrepancies between people’s implicit and explicit attitudes toward temptations, which can be explained by dual-process theory.(2) Participants who hold positive implicit attitudes toward temptations did perform worse on the following impulsive inhibition tasks, which indicates that they are more likely to behave impulsively when exposed to temptations. This result verifies the important prediction effect of implicit attitudes on impulsive behaviors.(3) There’s significant correlation between impulsivity personality measured by BIS-11and impulsive inhibition capacity, in other words, people with different trait self-control indeed shows different impulsive behaviors in the reality. Meanwhile, this result also proves that Orientation Stroop can be used as an effective experimental method to reveal people’s impulsive behaviors.