On the Inexplicability of the Implicit: Differences in the Information Provided by Implicit and Explicit Tests

Abstract

Implicit measures are often preferred to overt questioning in many areas of psychology. Their covert nature allows them to circumvent conscious expectations and biases, theoretically providing more objective indicators of people's true attitudes and beliefs. However, we argue that implicit and explicit measures tap into different memory systems, so that the interpretation of implicit measures is not as straightforward as the interpretation of explicit measures. We conducted an experiment investigating the relation between implicit and explicit measures of person impressions. The results demonstrate that a single stimulus can have opposite effects on implicit and explicit measures, supporting the theory that the measures reflect the contents of different memory systems. We suggest that implicit measures reflect simple associations stored in a “slow–learning” memory system, while explicit measures reflect a combination of these associations with contextually dependent memories stored in a “fast–binding” memory system.