Implicit attitudes matter for social judgments of others' preference, but do not make those judgments more or less accurate

Abstract

Drawing from a large dataset of responses to implicit and explicit attitude measures and social judgments of others' preferences (N = 97,176) across 95 distinct attitude domains, this Registered Report utilized a componential analysis of judgment accuracy to examine whether implicit attitudes affected the accuracy of social judgment. I found evidence that judgments of the population's preferences were associated with the population's true implicit (but not explicit) attitudes, and that individuals projected their implicit attitudes in addition to the projection of explicit attitudes when judging the population's true preferences. However, I found no evidence that stronger or weaker implicit attitudes were uniquely associated with greater or less accuracy in judging the population's true preferences. These results provide generalizable evidence that implicit attitudes matter greatly for social judgment accuracy in distinct and nuanced ways.