When feeling right leads to being right in the reporting of implicitly-formed attitudes, or how I learned to stop worrying and trust my gut

What predicts employer discrimination? The role of implicit and explicit racial attitudes

Hiring discrimination against black jobseekers remains prevalent in the United States. Yet, despite strong evidence about the existence of employer discrimination, we know relatively little about what motivates employers' discriminatory behavior. I draw on an original two-wave study with a sample of white hiring agents to examine whether respondents' explicit (deliberate) and implicit (automatic) racial attitudes predict their evaluations of white and black job applicants. Building on dual-process models of the attitude-behavior relationship, I theorize that the hiring process at many U.S. organizations-characterized by ambiguity, time pressure and distractions, and the legitimacy of emotions as a decision-making tool-encourages decision-making based on implicit rather than explicit cognition. Consistent with this theorization, I find implicit, but not explicit, racial attitudes predict respondents' evaluations of white applicants, and of black applicants relative to white applicants. This suggests hiring agents' behavior reflects implicit biases, rather than deliberate avoidance. The results further highlight the role of pro-white bias, not solely anti-black sentiment, in explaining discrimination: implicit attitudes were associated with bias in favor of white jobseekers, not only with discrimination against black jobseekers relative to white jobseekers. Finally, in open-ended responses, hiring agents explain their racially-motivated evaluations without invoking race, suggesting the ambiguity of the hiring process enables them to justify their behavior as colorblind. Together, these findings illustrate how employers can portray an egalitarian image while engaging in racially-motivated behavior.

Incidental Attitude Formation via the Surveillance Task: A Preregistered Replication of the Olson and Fazio (2001) Study

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered (N = 1,478 adult participants), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study (Olson & Fazio, 2001). We obtained evidence for a small evaluative-conditioning effect when "aware" participants were excluded using the original criterion-therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence from the surveillance-task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about "unaware" evaluative-conditioning effects.

The Implicit Misattribution Model of Evaluative Conditioning

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to a change in one’s attitude toward an object based on its contiguous pairing with other positive or negative objects. EC can, in principle, occur through multiple mechanisms, some more and some less thoughtful. We argue that one relatively low-thought route through which EC produces evaluative change is implicit misattribution. Our Implicit Misattribution Model (IMM) is premised on research indicating: a) attributional thinking is pervasive and relatively automatic, b) affective experiences are pervasive and relatively automatic, and c) errors in automatic attributional processing can lead to misattribution of affect from one object to another, resulting in the latter object taking on the affect produced by the former. Research employing the “surveillance paradigm” we developed provides support for the model, particularly its key moderating variable, source confusability. We further discuss assumptions of the model in terms of encoding, storage, and retrieval/application of the conditioned attitude, as well as the role of contingency awareness and other central issues in the EC literature.

Evaluative Conditioning From the Perspective of the Associative-Propositional Evaluation Model

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is defined as the change in the evaluation of a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to its pairing with a positive or negative unconditioned stimulus (US). According to the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model, EC effects can be the result of two functionally distinct learning mechanisms: associative and propositional learning. The current article reviews the core assumptions of the APE model regarding (1) the defining features of associative and propositional learning, (2) the mental representations resulting from the two learning mechanisms, (3) the processes involved in the behavioral expression of these representations, and (4) the automatic versus controlled nature of the processes underlying EC effects. In addition to reviewing the core assumptions of the APE model, the article reviews relevant evidence to illustrate the theory’s main hypotheses, its explanatory and predictive power, as well as empirical challenges for the theory.

The role of awareness in attitude formation through evaluative conditioning

This article provides a review of past and contemporary debates regarding the role of awareness in attitude formation through evaluative conditioning (EC), that is, by repeatedly pairing a stimulus with other stimuli of positive or negative valence. Because EC is considered the most prototypical method to form and change the network of evaluative associations in memory, the role of awareness in this effect is critical to the question of whether attitudes may be formed and changed through dual processes. We analyze the reasons why there has been so much discussion and disagreement regarding the role of awareness, review past and contemporary methodologies and their limitations, discuss the role of mental processes and conditioning procedures, and identify promising directions for future research in this area.