Research suggests that implicit evaluations are relatively insensitive to single instances of new, countervailing information that contradicts prior learning. In six experiments, however, we identify the critical role of the perceived diagnosticity of that new information: counter-attitudinal information that is deemed highly diagnostic of the target's true nature leads to a complete reversal of the previous implicit evaluation. Experiments 1a and 1b establish this effect by showing that newly-formed implicit evaluations are reversed minutes later with exposure to a single piece of highly diagnostic information. Experiment 2 demonstrates a valence asymmetry in participants’ likelihood of exhibiting rapid reversals of newly formed positive versus negative implicit evaluations. Experiment 3 provides evidence that a target must be personally responsible for the counter-attitudinal behavior and not merely incidentally associated with a negative act. Experiment 4 shows that participants exhibit revision only when they judge the target's counter-attitudinal behavior as offensive and thus diagnostic of his character. Experiment 5 demonstrates the behavioral implications of newly-revised implicit evaluations. These studies show that newly-formed implicit evaluations can be completely overturned through deliberative considerations about a single piece of counter-attitudinal information.
Human perceivers continually react to the social world implicitly —that is, spontaneously and rapidly. Earlier research suggested that implicit impressions of other people are slower to change than self-reported impressions in the face of contradictory evidence, often leaving them miscalibrated from what one learns to be true. Recent work, however, has identified conditions under which implicit impressions can be rapidly updated. Here, we review three lines of work showing that implicit impressions are responsive to information that is highly diagnostic, believable, or reframes earlier experience. These findings complement ongoing research on mechanisms of changing implicit impressions in a wider variety of groups, from real people to robots, and provide support for theoretical frameworks that embrace greater unity in the factors that can impact implicit and explicit social cognition.
How do people balance intuition and reason when making decisions? We report 6 studies that indicate that people are cued by the features of the decision problem to follow intuition or reason when making their choice. That is, when features of the choice resemble features commonly associated with rational processing, people tend to decide on the basis of reason; when features of the choice match those associated with intuitive processing, people tend to decide on the basis of intuition. Choices that are seen as objectively evaluable (Study 1A), sequential (Studies 1B and 3), complex (Study 2), or precise (Study 4) elicit a preference for choosing rationally. This framework accurately predicts people's choices in variants of both the ratio-bias (Study 3) and ambiguity-aversion paradigms (Study 4). Discussion focuses on the relationship between the task cuing account, other decision-making models, and dual-process accounts of cognition.
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