The Self-Organization of Explicit Attitudes

Abstract

How do minds produce explicit attitudes over several hundred milliseconds? Speeded evaluative measures have revealed implicit biases beyond cognitive control and subjective awareness, yet mental processing may culminate in an explicit attitude that feels personally endorsed and corroborates voluntary intentions. We argue that self-reported explicit attitudes derive from a continuous, temporally dynamic process, whereby multiple simultaneously conflicting sources of information self-organize into a meaningful mental representation. While our participants reported their explicit (like vs. dislike) attitudes toward White versus Black people by moving a cursor to a "like" or "dislike" response box, we recorded streaming x- and y-coordinates from their hand-movement trajectories. We found that participants' hand-movement paths exhibited greater curvature toward the "dislike" response when they reported positive explicit attitudes toward Black people than when they reported positive explicit attitudes toward White people. Moreover, these trajectories were characterized by movement disorder and competitive velocity profiles that were predicted under the assumption that the deliberate attitudes emerged from continuous interactions between multiple simultaneously conflicting constraints.