Are We Puppets on a String? Comparing the Impact of Contingency and Validity on Implicit and Explicit Evaluations

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that implicit and explicit evaluations of the same object can diverge. Explanations of such dissociations frequently appeal to dual-process theories, such that implicit evaluations are assumed to reflect object-valence contingencies independent of their perceived validity, whereas explicit evaluations reflect the perceived validity of object-valence contingencies. Although there is evidence supporting these assumptions, it remains unclear if dissociations can arise in situations in which object-valence contingencies are judged to be true or false during the learning of these contingencies. Challenging dual-process accounts that propose a simultaneous operation of two parallel learning mechanisms, results from three experiments showed that the perceived validity of evaluative information about social targets qualified both explicit and implicit evaluations when validity information was available immediately after the encoding of the valence information; however, delaying the presentation of validity information reduced its qualifying impact for implicit, but not explicit, evaluations.

The Effect of the Validity of Co-occurrence on Automatic and Deliberate Evaluation

“…To summarize, the results found by Peters and Gawronski (2011) and Gregg et al (2006) are the best existing evidence that explicit validity information can have distinct effects on automatic versus deliberate evaluation, at least when the validity information is not provided immediately with the co-occurrence information.…”

“…The results observed by Peters and Gawronski (2011) and Gregg et al (2006), are open to alternative explanations not relevant to the discrepancy hypothesis. The discrepancy found by Peters and Gawronski could be explained by reduced overall sensitivity of the automatic measure in comparison to the deliberate evaluation measure.…”

“…These studies found, contrary to the discrepancy hypothesis, that when the validity information was provided before or immediately after presenting the co-occurrence, validity information had the same effect on automatic and deliberate evaluation (Boucher & Rydell, 2012;Peters & Gawronski, 2011;Siegel, Sigall, & Huber, 2012). The lack of discrepancy found between automatic and deliberate evaluation in studies that provided co-occurrence and validity information at the same time might be interpreted as evidence that automatic evaluation is as sensitive to validity information as deliberate evaluation.…”

“…Surprisingly, direct support of that hypothesis is scarce with the best existing contribution coming from experiments that provided the validity information well after all the co-occurrence information (Gregg, et al, 2006;Peters & Gawronski, 2011).…”

“…Indeed, studies that employed that method provide the only existing evidence for different sensitivity of automatic versus deliberate evaluation to explicit validity information. In one demonstration, Peters and Gawronski (2011) presented two target men with negative behavioral descriptions and two with positive behaviors.…”