The Self-Organization of Explicit Attitudes

Abstract

How do minds produce explicit attitudes over several hundred milliseconds? Speeded evaluative measures have revealed implicit biases beyond cognitive control and subjective awareness, yet mental processing may culminate in an explicit attitude that feels personally endorsed and corroborates voluntary intentions. We argue that self-reported explicit attitudes derive from a continuous, temporally dynamic process, whereby multiple simultaneously conflicting sources of information self-organize into a meaningful mental representation. While our participants reported their explicit (like vs. dislike) attitudes toward White versus Black people by moving a cursor to a "like" or "dislike" response box, we recorded streaming x- and y-coordinates from their hand-movement trajectories. We found that participants' hand-movement paths exhibited greater curvature toward the "dislike" response when they reported positive explicit attitudes toward Black people than when they reported positive explicit attitudes toward White people. Moreover, these trajectories were characterized by movement disorder and competitive velocity profiles that were predicted under the assumption that the deliberate attitudes emerged from continuous interactions between multiple simultaneously conflicting constraints.

The ABC of Ambivalence

“…In three studies, participants' dichotomous evaluations with regard to a number of ambivalent and univalent attitude objects were assessed with a computerized task while measuring their movements of the mouse cursor over the screen. Tracking peoples' mouse trajectories can give insight into the mental processes accompanying the formation of an explicit evaluation (e.g., Freeman & Ambady, 2010;Freeman, Dale, & Farmer, 2011;Wojnowicz, Ferguson, Dale, & Spivey, 2009).…”

Formation, representation, and activation of contextualized attitudes

“…With increasing delays, however, deliberate processing may involve the retrieval of other target-related information, including information that has been learned in other contexts (cf. Cunningham, Zelazo, Packer, & Van Bavel, 2007;Wojnowicz, Ferguson, Dale, & Spivey, 2009). In this case, perceivers would have to resolve the resulting inconsistency between conflicting pieces of evaluative information to avoid a state of attitudinal ambivalence (Van Harreveld, Van der Pligt, & De Liver, 2009).…”

MouseTracker: Software for studying real-time mental processing using a computer mouse-tracking method

“…Hypothesis testing can then be performed on mean trajectory data and various analyses can be conducted. See the analyses conducted in prior mouse-tracking studies for more information (Dale et al, 2007;Dale et al, 2008;Farmer et al, 2007;Freeman & Ambady, 2009;Freeman et al, 2008;Freeman et al, 2010;McKinstry et al, 2008;Spivey et al, 2005;Wojnowicz et al, 2009). …”

“…Simultaneously and partially active stereotype knowledge belonging to multiple social categories was triggered across ongoing perceptual accrual of the face, and this fluctuating mixture settled over time onto ultimate judgments of others. A mouse-tracking paradigm has also been recently used to explore the time course of race categorization (Freeman, Pauker, Apfelbaum, & Ambady, 2010) and social attitude activation (Wojnowicz, Ferguson, Dale, & Spivey, 2009).…”