Of Two Minds: Forming and Changing Valence-Inconsistent Implicit and Explicit Attitudes

ABSTRACT—Because different processes underlie implicit and explicit attitudes, we hypothesized that they are dif-ferentially sensitive to different kinds of information. We measured implicit and explicit attitudes over time, as dif-ferent types of attitude-relevant information about a single attitude object were presented. As expected, explicit atti-tudes formed and changed in response to the valence of consciously accessible, verbally presented behavioral in-formation about the target. In contrast, implicit attitudes formed and changed in response to the valence of sub-liminally presented primes, reflecting the progressive accretion of attitude object–evaluation pairings. As a consequence, when subliminal primes and behavioral in-formation were of opposite valence, people formed implicit and explicit attitudes of conflicting valence. Consider the following scenario. A woman talks to a man at a singles mixer. He seems to be a perfectly pleasant conversa-tionalist, assertive without being pushy. When asked later what she thinks of him, her first inclination is to say, ‘‘Nice guy.’ ’ Yet a friend points out that she seemed inattentive to his approaches and disgusted by his presence, perhaps because he is similar to an ex-lover with whom things ended badly. Who has not had a similar experience of conscious reactions that contrast with unconscious ones? Social psychologists have recently begun to explain such apparently different reactions as reflecting distinct processes of evaluation that may occur sim