Implicit attitudes matter for social judgments of others' preference, but do not make those judgments more or less accurate

Abstract

Drawing from a large dataset of responses to implicit and explicit attitude measures and social judgments of others' preferences (N = 97,176) across 95 distinct attitude domains, this Registered Report utilized a componential analysis of judgment accuracy to examine whether implicit attitudes affected the accuracy of social judgment. I found evidence that judgments of the population's preferences were associated with the population's true implicit (but not explicit) attitudes, and that individuals projected their implicit attitudes in addition to the projection of explicit attitudes when judging the population's true preferences. However, I found no evidence that stronger or weaker implicit attitudes were uniquely associated with greater or less accuracy in judging the population's true preferences. These results provide generalizable evidence that implicit attitudes matter greatly for social judgment accuracy in distinct and nuanced ways.

Misperceptions of Support for Climate Policy Represent Multiple Phenomena Predicted by Different Factors Across Intergroup Boundaries

“…To examine these different types of climate change PI across intergroup boundaries, we recruited a non-probability, quota-matched US nationally representative sample (N final = 848, based on preregistered sampling/statistical power criteria) via Forthright Access Panels (https://www.forthrightaccess.com/). Participants first rated their own support for 18 environmental policies, allowing us to examine if participant's own support was related to perceived support, as past work has found (Lees, 2021;Mildenberger & Tingley, 2019;Van Boven et al, 2012). Participants then estimated the percentage of Democrats and Republicans (partisans and leaners), and Registered Voters, that support each of the 18 policies, which served as our primary measures of discrete and relative PI when compared to the true preferences of each group, which we gathered from national polling data.…”