Stereotypes, Prejudice, and the Taxonomy of the Implicit Social Mind¹

Abstract

How do cognition and affect interact to produce action? Research in intergroup psychology illuminates this question by investigating the relationship between stereotypes and prejudices about social groups. Yet it is now clear that many social attitudes are implicit (roughly, nonconscious or involuntary). This raises the question: how does the distinction between cognition and affect apply to implicit mental states? An influential view—roughly analogous to a Humean theory of action—is that “implicit stereotypes” and “implicit prejudices” constitute two separate constructs, reflecting different mental processes and neural systems. On this basis, some have also argued that interventions to reduce discrimination should combat implicit stereotypes and prejudices separately. We propose an alternative (anti‐Humean) framework. We argue that all putative implicit stereotypes are affect‐laden and all putative implicit prejudices are “semantic,” that is, they stand in co‐activating associations with concepts and beliefs. Implicit biases, therefore, consist in “clusters” of semantic‐affective associations, which differ in degree, rather than kind. This framework captures the psychological structure of implicit bias, promises to improve the power of indirect measures to predict behavior, and points toward the design of more effective interventions to combat discrimination.

The relationship between implicit intergroup attitudes and beliefs

“…Taken together, these findings clearly support the core idea of theories of implicit social cognition that suggest that implicit attitudes and implicit beliefs are inextricably linked to each other due to the evaluative content that they share (5). At a more general level, the present work corroborates empirical work and theorizing on the major role of evaluation in shaping word meaning (6), automatic stimulus processing (33)(34)(35), and putatively purely cognitive higher level reasoning (4).…”

“…However, such clear-cut separation of the human mind into attitudes or evaluative representations, on the one hand, and beliefs or semantic representations, on the other hand, may be rooted in phenomenology rather than in empirical evidence (4,5). Pioneering work on the measurement of word meaning from the 1950s demonstrated that attitudes (valence) and beliefs (semantics) are inextricably connected (6): When dimension reduction techniques, such as factor analysis, are applied to the space of word meanings, the latent factor accounting for the majority of semantic variance is valence; that is, the evaluative component dominates word meaning.…”

“…Similarly, our occasional use of the terms associate and association does not indicate an a priori commitment to associative theories (21,22); rather, these terms are used as shorthand for automatically revealed conceptual compatibility, be it in the form of a proposition (e.g., "Asians are smart") or a mere association (e.g., Asian-smart). Surprisingly, beyond limited tests involving individual social groups and individual belief attributes (29)(30)(31)(32), the relationship between implicit attitudes and implicit beliefs has never been systematically investigated (5).…”

Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility

“…Such ambiguity also contributes to the difficulty of measuring implicit biases and their effects on discriminatory behavior (cf. Oswald et al, 2013;Greenwald, Banaji and Nosek, 2015), although I argue elsewhere that concerns about the replicability and real-world import of implicit bias research are overblown, conflating important-but-localized outstanding empirical questions with hyperbolic doubts about the entire field (Madva and Brownstein, 2017;Brownstein, Madva and Gawronski, ms). See also note 26.…”

A Plea for Anti-Anti-Individualism: How Oversimple Psychology Misleads Social Policy

“…Writers like Banks, Ford, and Haslanger are responding in particular to the upsurge of interest in implicit (unreported) rather than explicit (self-reported) prejudice, while Dixon et al (2012) primarily discuss explicit prejudice. I will not weigh in here on the various controversies about the best ways to measure, conceptualize, and predict prejudice and discrimination (but see, e.g., Madva 2016a;2016b;Brownstein & Madva 2012;Madva & Brownstein 2017). In what follows, I appeal to research on both implicit and explicit prejudice, and I believe we should draw the same general lessons for addressing both types of problematic attitude.…”