Implicit Attitudes in Public Opinion

Abstract

Implicit attitudes are automatic evaluations of objects: political candidates and parties, racial and ethnic groups, national symbols and consumer products, and so on. These responses are spontaneously triggered and hard to control, and can operate subconsciously. Implicit attitudes stand in contradistinction to their explicit variety: self-reported attitudes that people actively direct, control, and are conscious of. Public-opinion scholars have overwhelmingly centered on explicit attitudes, painting a portrait of mass opinion formation as slow, deliberative, and often dispassionate. But psychological research since the late 1970s has agglomerated into the view that much of people’s thinking is fast, automatic, and affectively charged—in a word, implicit. Heaped onto all this is the critical insight that implicit attitudes precede, and many times structure, their explicit counterparts. The implications for the study of public opinion are manifold. This article brings some order to all this by familiarizing readers with the conceptualization, measurement, and analysis of implicit attitudes in American public opinion.