Intentionality of implicit attitudes: how metacognition shapes our explicit thoughts (2012)

Undergraduates: Kimberly Jean Phillips, Erin Cooley

Faculty Advisor: B. Keith Payne
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Much research investigates the source of divergence in implicit and explicit attitudes. The Metacognitive Model in particular suggests that thinking about one’s implicit attitudes can ultimately affect one’s explicit attitudes. Based on this, our study investigated how thinking about the intentionality of one’s implicit attitudes can affect explicit attitudes. Wegner tells us that humans infer causality of their behavior after the fact, making intentionality subjective. We hypothesized that individuals led to conclude that their implicit attitudes were intentional would report more similar explicit attitudes than individuals led to conclude their implicit attitudes were unintentional. We found that it was true that individuals who perceived their implicit attitudes as intentional were more likely to have correlating explicit attitudes than individuals who did not view their implicit attitudes as intentional. This lends support to the Metacognitive Model and the idea that intentionality is a post-hoc inference, as well as helping uncover information about implicit and explicit attitude correlation. Future studies can further investigate how intentionality relates to implicit and explicit attitudes, how other constructs such as responsibility relate to implicit and explicit attitudes, ways to better align implicit and explicit attitudes based on metacognition, and ways to extend favorable implicit attitudes into explicit attitudes.