Executive Control in Implicit Attitude Measurement

Ohio State University, Columbus OH

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Abstract

The goal of this project is to understand the role of executive control in implicit attitude measurement. Executive control refers to the capacity to behave in strategic ways, pursuing goals while inhibiting responses that interfere with goal-directed behavior. Recent research provides evidence that executive control may act to inhibit the effect of automatic reactions on implicit test performance. An important consequence of this relationship is that differences in implicit test performance between different individuals or groups could be driven by differences in either automatic activation or executive control. Research in the last few years has demonstrated that implicit attitude measures may be to be influenced by many situational manipulations. These findings are important because they suggest that the automatic processes tapped by implicit attitude measures may be strongly determined by situations as opposed to dispositions, and highly flexible, as opposed to rigid. The guiding hypothesis of this project is that some situational contexts influence implicit test performance by affecting automatically activated associations, whereas other contexts influence the degree of executive control engaged. The process dissociation procedure will be used to separate and quantify the contributions of automatic processes and executive control. Three series of experiments will apply this method to determine those situational features which influence automatic activation, and those which influence executive control. The first series examines contexts expected to change mental associations to the attitude object. The second series examines contexts expected to affect the motivation to process strategically. The third series examines more complex situations (e.g. the presence of an African American experimenter) which might influence implicit prejudice measures through both routes.