Attitudes help guide people's behavior and judgment and assist in decisions about how people react to the words. Asking people to report their feelings helps to measure one's attitude. Implicit attitudes mediate actions (Both favorable and unfavorable), thoughts, or feelings towards a social object and are introspectively unidentified traces of experience. Implicit attitudes are impossible or difficult to control since they occur spontaneously as automatic evaluations. Therefore, implicit attitudes have an unexpected influence on a recipient. Social influence is a powerful tool in social psychology.
The beliefs, opinions, knowledge, behaviors, emotions, and opinions of other people shape the way an individual perceives and understands other people. The influence can come in the form of learning, direct persuasion, obedience to authority, modeling, peer pressure, unconscious mimicry, and so on. Besides, social influence underlies the fabric of culture from a broader perspective. As people create new ways of doing things or thinking, develop new styles or fashions, the force of social influence leads to these developments (Buckwalter, 2019). Eventually, this serves as a starting point for future developments and to permeate a people. People's attitude towards elements of culture (food, styles, innovation) is a determining factor in the stagnation or spread of culture itself. It is also central to many studies of social influence.
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Many social influence studies have revealed that when there is influence between two people, it typically means that the attitudes of the sources of the source of influence are brought closer to the attitudes of the recipient of social influence. Decisions and actions towards other people are usually mediated by automatic cognitive processing and hence is beyond control. However, one has to have the ability to control behavior to have moral responsibility for it (Mason, 2010). therefore, since implicit attitudes cause behavior, if people cannot control implicit attitudes, then they cannot be responsible for that behavior. However, current research does not provide sufficient evidence to establish that responsibility usually requires ability, that it is possible to control implicit attitudes, that these attitudes cause behavior to a significant extent, and that the behaviors caused by implicit attitudes are uncontrollable.
Social psychologists have researched implicit attitudes, leaving questions on how best people know their own attitudes. Implicit attitudes can be measured to predict knowledge. This is done for those behaviors that cannot be predicted by consciously held attitudes or by knowledge. Also, research suggests that one will show various attitudes towards an object when the attitudes of the object triggers some automatic evaluations affecting behavioral dispositions (Buckwalter, 2019). Stimuli that trigger negative attitudes lead to immediate avoidance behavior, while an immediate positive behavior is as a result of a stimulus triggering a positive attitude in the person. Since these behavioral responses are unconscious and automatic, people are completely not aware of their behavioral response resulting from implicit attitudes.
For instance, an automatic negative attitude towards overweight individuals will automatically lead to participants sitting away from fat women with whom they are expected to interact, and vice versa. This phenomenon is also seen with an implicitly held racial attitude where negative racial attitudes automatically make people avoid interactions with people from certain races. These implicit attitudes affect how participants smile, how long they interacted, how much social comments people make, and how much speech errors they make during these interactions (Buckwalter, 2019). however, explicit measurements are usually better at predicting behavior than measurement of implicit attitudes. One thing that is for sure is that both explicit and implicit behaviors are essential in predicting behavior.
Automatic or implicit attitudes predict spontaneous actions. On the other hand, controlled processes predict deliberate actions. For example, individuals who endorsed traditional beliefs about sexuality and gender showed negative non-verbal behavior but were verbally friendlier to the gay confederates. This showed that the prejudice of these individuals showed through automatic responses such as blinking and eye contact even though consciously they were over-correcting their attitude (Mason, 2010). The extent to which implicit attitudes influence behavioral response depends on one’s opportunity to react and his or her motivation. When individuals' processing abilities are not preoccupied or lacking, and they are highly motivated to control their response, they are likely to show behavioral responses that reflect intentional responses.
Moreover, in a study to measure the anticipated discomfort or willingness to associate with people of color, like black people for example, persons who had least concern on being biased and had the motivation to avoid interracial conflict expressed their discomfort. However, persons concerned about not appearing biased against the African-Americans attempted to hide their prejudice by reporting less-anticipated discomfort. Therefore, people can reduce the influence that implicit attitudes have on their behavior through motivations to control responses (Mason, 2010). Psychologically, some people are even unaware that these attitudes exist since lack of ability and unawareness are intertwined. Besides, the basis of measuring implicit attitudes is to capture those behaviors that persons are unwilling to report. When questioned for social or individual purposes, individuals are likely to alter a response, especially when individuals are unwilling to report their affective response when they do not want others to know how they feel.
Additionally, it would be more necessary to explore the mechanisms underlying an influence if the situation in which a person’s implicit attitudes have an independent influence on the social influence of a recipient has been explored substantially. For instance, the influence of implicit attitudes on how people treat others is contrastive rather than assimilative. In this case, the implicit attitude may be independent of the attitude the person is expressing in his or her speech. In contrast to implicit attitudes, explicit attitudes exert intense effects on decisions and behaviors since the latter occurs at a conscious level (Buckwalter, 2019). As a result, they are characterized by ease in self-reporting and are described as deliberately formed attitudes. However, the process that governs the formation and operation of both implicit and explicit attitudes has not been unraveled despite extensive research on the subject.
Implicit and explicit attitudes have a weak correlation. Attitude is characterized by ambivalence, strength, and accessibility, regardless of whether it is explicit or implicit. Strong attitudes are firmly conceived and hence have an immense influence on behavior. For instance, attitudes are expected to have immense strength when people have a vested interest in them. Also, believes that are important to a person are more likely to have a significant effect on the person's behavior and how he or she interact to the world around him or her (Buckwalter, 2019). Someone is also likely to show strong attitudes when it concerns events or ideas that are known to them. Ambivalence can be referred to as the ratio of negative to positive measures that determine an attitude, and hence ambivalence determines the type of attitude being expressed. Irrespective of whether they are voluntary or involuntary, the two forms of attitudes, explicit and implicit attitudes, are expressed in one's behavior.
In conclusion, people sometimes from automatic and unconscious attitudes against specific people, objects or groups of people. These attitudes sometimes conflict with the explicit attitudes and are usually interpreted as judgment. Besides, implicit attitudes affect behavior, both morally and socially, and hence is a focus by many researchers to understand the basics. For instance, people may subconsciously show biasness against African Americans but consciously report the non-racist belief that they have no preference for whites over people of color such as African-Americans, among other implicit biases.
References
Buckwalter, W. (2019). Implicit attitudes and the ability argument. Philosophical Studies , 176 (11), 2961-2990.
Mason, W. (2010). Implicit social influence. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/7373
