The Cultural Context of Cognition: What the Implicit Association Test Tells Us About How Culture Works1

Abstract

This article employs evidence from a literature within social psychology on the malleability of scores on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measure that is widely used to assess implicit attitudes, and other implicit cognition measures, to provide a theoretical framework for incorporating implicit processes into sociological accounts of culture. Studies from this literature demonstrate the fundamentally contextual and interactional nature of implicit cognition; that is, how the cultural environment shapes the activation of cognitive associations. Understanding how culture works to influence behavior requires attention to the interaction between the cultural environment—including symbols and media, place, situations, and networks—and cognitive representations. Using this theoretical framework, I discuss how evidence from the sociology of culture regarding the nature of this cultural environment can inform our understanding of culture in action.