Children's implicit attitude acquisition: Evaluative statements succeed, repeated pairings fail

Abstract

From the earliest ages tested, children and adults show similar overall magnitudes of implicit attitudes toward various social groups. However, such consistency in attitude magnitude may obscure meaningful age‐related change in the ways that children (vs. adults) acquire implicit attitudes. This experiment investigated children's implicit attitude acquisition by comparing the separate and joint effects of two learning interventions, previously shown to form implicit attitudes in adults. Children (N = 280, ages 7–11 years) were taught about novel social groups through either evaluative statements (ES; auditorily presented verbal statements such as ‘Longfaces are bad, Squarefaces are good’), repeated evaluative pairings (REP; visual pairings of Longface/Squareface group members with valenced images such as a puppy or snake), or a combination of ES+REP. Results showed that children acquired implicit attitudes following ES and ES+REP, with REP providing no additional learning beyond ES alone. Moreover, children did not acquire implicit attitudes in four variations of REP, each designed to facilitate learning by systematically increasing verbal scaffolding to specify (a) the learning goal, (b) the valence of the unconditioned stimuli, and (c) the group categories of the conditioned stimuli. These findings underscore the early‐emerging role of verbal statements in children's implicit attitude acquisition, as well as a possible age‐related limit in children's acquisition of novel implicit attitudes from repeated pairings.

Implicit? What Do You Mean? A Comprehensive Review of the Delusive Implicitness Construct in Attitude Research

“…The IAT is often considered the ideal-case procedure for assessing associations. For instance, Charlesworth et al (2019) recently noted that their findings are "particularly impressive considering that implicit attitudes were measured on an arguably 'associative' test (the Implicit Association Test)" (p. 7). We consider this an overstatement and argue that what is needed is a way to separate "associative" versus "nonassociative" contributions to IAEs.…”

“…Similar instruction-based effects have been documented for the mere exposure paradigm (Van Dessel et al, 2017) and approach–avoidance training (Van Dessel et al, 2015). Evaluative statements have also recently been shown to be more effective than the experience of co-occurrences at creating IAEs also in children, who are thought to be more sensitive to low-level learning (Charlesworth et al, 2019).…”

The Rational Dynamics of Implicit Thought

“…Some results (for instance, Charlesworth et al [2020]) already seem to lend support, but clearly much more work needs to be done. But much like the other proposals that the belief view interacts with, I take it that the epistemic standing of the belief view rests both on empirical 16 There is another sense in which the current approach differs from others.…”

“…Once implicit a itudes have been incorporated and entrenched in these complicated and mutually-reinforcing networks, however, changing them becomes much harder. In a similar vein, the conflict between evidence and self-conception in implicit thought can explain why children tend to develop implicit a itudes that are (initially) more evidence sensitive than those in adults [Charlesworth et al 2020]. Children are still developing complicated networks of self-regard during the same time they are developing implicit a itudes [Robins and Trzesniewski 2005], and the lack of an established connection between the two reduces the rational pressure that such a network can exert on a particular implicit belief that a child may develop.…”

Implicit measures of beliefs

“…That these effects reflect learning is well-substantiated. Novel implicit evaluations can be established by learning interventions (Charlesworth et al, 2020;De Houwer et al, 1998), and these effects increase with more extensive learning (Cummins et al, 2018;Cummins & Roche, 2020). Effects can also be dramatically shifted for both experimental stimuli (Cone et al, 2017) and real-life stimuli with strong pre-existing implicit evaluations (Van Dessel et al, 2019).…”