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Who owns implicit attitudes 1 Running Head: WHO OWNS IMPLICIT ATTITUDES? Who owns implicit attitudes? Testing a metacognitive perspective B. Keith Payne Erin Cooley Chris Loersch Ryan Lei Please address correspondence to: Keith Payne University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Campus Box 3270, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 Email: [email protected] Who owns implicit attitudes 2 Abstract Do implicit evaluations reflect one’s personal attitude, or something external such as cultural knowledge? We propose that the answer depends on metacognitive inferences people draw about the meaning of their implicit responses. Participants completed an implicit measure of attitudes toward gay men, followed by a manipulation that led them to construe their implicit responses as belonging to themselves (owned), or as unrelated to the self (disowned). When they construed their implicit responses as their own, they later reported explicit attitudes that were consistent with implicit responses. Disowning their implicit responses, in contrast, led to explicit reports that were less consistent with implicit responses. Effects were replicated by measuring individual differences in perceptions of ownership. In addition to influencing explicit attitude reports, inferences of ownership moderated whether implicit bias was detected on the personalized IAT (which is designed to measure personal attitudes) but ownership did not moderate effects on a standard IAT (which may not distinguish between personal and extra-personal associations). Ownership of implicit attitudes may depend on metacognitions about those attitudes. Key Words: Implicit attitudes; Automatic; Social Cognition; Extra-personal associations; Prejudice; Heterosexism Who owns implicit attitudes 3 Who owns implicit attitudes? Testing a metacognitive perspective When thoughts are automatically activated, they sometimes feel as if they do not belong to us at all. We say that such thoughts “come to mind,” or “occur to us,” portraying the thoughts as agents and our minds as passive receivers. The feeling of foreignness is highlighted by research on implicit attitudes, which finds that automatic evaluations often differ from explicitly endorsed beliefs. In such cases, research participants often describe their scores on implicit tests not as reflecting their own personal views, but instead as reflecting cultural knowledge or stereotypes. Nonetheless, implicit attitude measures predict individual differences in a wide range of behaviors, and do so about as well as explicit attitudes (Greenwald et al., 2009; Cameron, Brown-Ianuzzi, & Payne, 2011). If an attitude predicts an individual’s behavior, then it seems that it should be in some sense considered his or her own attitude. If an evaluation automatically comes to mind, should it be considered to belong to whomever owns that mind? Or does personal ownership depend instead on a reflective act in which someone claims it as one’s own? The question of whether implicit attitudes reflect a person’s “true self” is important for interpreting instances of implicit prejudice (Arkes & Tetlock, 2004; Cameron, Payne, & Knobe, 2010; Gawronski, Peters, & LeBel, 2008). If only actions reflecting the true self are morally blameworthy as some have suggested, then are people morally responsible for discrimination that results from implicit bias (Dan-Cohen, 1991; Frankfurt, 1969; Sripada, 2009)? The answer seems to depend, at least in part, on the empirical question of whether automatically activated thoughts reflect the personal self. Who owns implicit attitudes 4 In this paper we take a metacognitive approach to the ownership of implicit cognition. We first review two contrasting perspectives on how personal and extra-personal associations might be distinguished. We then consider the implications of metacognitive theories for whether, when, and how automatically activated attitudes may become personal or extra-personal. Based on an extension of these theories, we hypothesized that automatic evaluations provide input into a metacognitive inference process in which they may be adopted as one’s own, or disowned. Whether an implicit evaluation is a personal or extra-personal association therefore depends on how the subject interprets his or her subjective experience. Automatic evaluations construed as personal should be more likely to be expressed on explicit measures, and also more likely to be detected by implicit measures designed to assess personal attitudes. We provide evidence across four studies that metacognitive inferences have important consequences for both explicit and implicit attitudes. Theoretical Background Some early research on the validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998) suggested that this measure might be sensitive to influences other than respondents’ personal attitudes. Karpinski and Hilton (2001) reported that an IAT measuring attitudes toward apples and candy bars showed a pronounced preference for apples, but it did not predict behavior when participants chose between the two items. The authors suggested that the IAT may reflect environmental associations, such as a cultural norm that people should prefer apples to candy bars. Choice behavior, in contrast, was argued to be driven by personal liking for apples and candy bars. Olson and Fazio (2004) extended this reasoning and argued that the IAT confounds personal attitudes and extra-personal evaluations. They defined extra-personal associations as Who owns implicit attitudes 5 “associations that do not contribute to one’s evaluation of an attitude object and thus do not become activated when one encounters the object but that are nevertheless available in memory” (p. 653). According to this view, if an evaluation is spontaneously activated when encountering an attitude object, then it must be a personal attitude. That is, if it pops into my mind then it must belong to me. Measurement-based accounts of personal and extra-personal attitudes To separate personal and extra-personal associations, Olson and Fazio (2004) developed a “personalized” IAT, primarily by changing the category labels from “pleasant” and “unpleasant” to “I like” and “I don’t like.” The personalized IAT was more successful than the traditional IAT at predicting a choice between apples and candy bars. In another study, scores on a traditional IAT were influenced by exposure to the misinformed opinions of schoolboys, but the personalized IAT was not (Han, Olson, & Fazio, 2006). These studies suggest that personal evaluations reflect associations between an attitude object and one’s likes and dislikes, whereas associations between an attitude object and general categories “good” and “bad” may reflect both personal likes and cultural associations. From this perspective, personal and extra-personal associations refer to separate sets of associations in memory. Ownership as a conscious judgment An alternative view is that ownership does not reside in the memory associations per se, but instead in the metacognitive inferences people make. Nosek and Hansen (2008) argued that the personal versus non-personal nature of evaluations is not a feature of the associations stored in memory, but it is instead a consequence of conscious judgments made about those associations (see also Gawronski, Peters, & LeBel, 2008). Based on this reasoning, Banaji, Nosek, and colleagues (Banaji, 2001; Banaji et al., 2006) argued that because the judgment of Who owns implicit attitudes 6 ownership is conscious, “it is less sensible to think of a sharp line between person and culture when thinking about implicit cognition” (p. xx). Metacognitive models of implicit and explicit attitudes Metacognition refers to thinking about one’s own thoughts, or feelings. One kind of metacognition is making judgments about one’s own implicit associations, and researchers have invoked metacognition as a key factor differentiating between implicit and explicit evaluations. The role of metacognition has been developed most comprehensively in the AssociativePropositional model of Evaluation (APE; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006) and the Metacognitive Model of attitudes (MCM; Petty, Brinol, & DeMarree, 2007). The APE claims that automatically activated associations provide input into a propositional reasoning process that assigns truth values. Based on propositional reasoning, people may accept the activated information as valid or reject it as invalid. Implicit tests are said to be proxies for automatic associations, whereas explicit tests reflect the outcome of propositional reasoning. Propositional reasoning is therefore critical for understanding whether implicit and explicit tests will agree. The Metacognitive model (MCM) of attitudes distinguishes between evaluative associations which are activated from memory, and validity tags that are applied to them (Petty, Brinol, & DeMarree, 2007). Validity tags are considered to be the result of metacognitive inferences about whether the attitude is valid or not. The APE emphasizes reasoning processes, whereas the MCM emphasizes attitude representations stored in memory. Nonetheless, both models recognize that the residues of current processing may be stored as representations, and that representations can be retrieved and modified over time. Thus, although the APE and MCM differ on a number of important points, their implications for the present question are similar. Who owns implicit attitudes 7 The APE and MCM focus on metacognitive inferences specifically about whether the attitude is valid – that is, whether it is true, accurate, or justified (but for a metacognitive approach to conscious awareness, see Hofmann & Wilson, 2010). We suggest that the basic principle can be extended to encompass a variety of other inferences, including inferences about whether an attitude is one’s own. One framework useful for integrating these different kinds of inferences is the Situated Inference Model of priming (Loersch & Payne, 2011). This model was designed to account for the wide variety of different ways that priming can affect judgment, motivation, and behavior. For example, participants primed with the concept of aggression might be more likely to perceive another individual as more hostile (construal priming; Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977; Srull & Wyer, 1979), behave more aggressively themselves (behavior priming; Carver, Ganellen, Froming, & Chambers, 1983), and become motivated to actively seek out an opportunity to aggress against someone else (goal priming; Todorov & Bargh, 2002). The Situated Inference Model posits that priming simply increases the accessibility of information that is related (semantically, evaluatively, or experientially) to the primed content. People’s default assumption is that whatever thoughts and feelings come to mind refer to whatever target is in focal attention (Higgins, 1998; Clore & Gasper, 2000). That information is used to guide responses when people infer that the primed information is part of their own spontaneous reaction to the target. However, the meaning of the primed information must be constrained by the options afforded by the perceiver’s immediate context. For example, if aggression-related thoughts come to mind while one is trying to form an impression of a new person, one might conclude that the person is aggressive. But if the same thoughts come to mind as one is preparing to act, one might act aggressively. The Situated Inference Model highlights that the kinds of metacognitive inferences people make are not limited by the associations that Who owns implicit attitudes 8 are activated; they are instead flexible interpretations constructed to meet demands of the situation. As applied to implicit evaluations, the Situated Inference Model suggests that people might make a wide variety of inferences about what those evaluations mean, along many dimensions. Truth value or validity is just one of many possible dimensions. For example, people might also make inferences about whether the evaluation is intended; whether it is wanted; or most important for the current question, whether it reflects one’s own personal attitude. The Present Research Our analysis of metacognitive models led us to predict that the inferences people make about their implicit evaluations could influence whether they are perceived as personal or extrapersonal evaluations, with important consequences. In each study, we first measured implicit attitudes using the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005). Next we either manipulated or measured inferences about whether the feelings experienced during the task reflect participants own attitudes. Finally, we measured subsequent explicit or implicit attitudes to assess how perceptions of ownership affected later evaluations. First, we predicted that when participants construe implicit evaluations as their own, they would be more likely to report them explicitly. In Study 1 we manipulated perceived ownership and found that this inference moderated implicit-explicit consistency. In Study 2 we replicated this effect by measuring rather than manipulating perceived ownership. In Study 3 we both measured and manipulated perceived ownership to establish that perceived ownership was indeed the mediator by which our manipulation influenced implicit-explicit correspondence. Also in Study 3, we tested whether inferences of ownership could be separated from inferences of validity. There is good reason to expect that inferences of ownership and validity Who owns implicit attitudes 9 should be positively correlated, because people tend to believe that their own beliefs are true (Gawronski et al., 2008). However, we provide evidence in Study 3 that inferences that an evaluation is one’s “own” cannot be reduced to inferences that the evaluation is valid. Inferences of ownership provide one basis for expressing attitudes explicitly, or rejecting them. However, inferences about ownership might also have effects on implicit associations themselves. To make the inference that “my automatic evaluations reflect my own attitudes” requires forging an association between the evaluation and one’s personal likes and dislikes. As highlighted by the MCM, the metacognitive judgments people make may be stored in memory and retrieved later, and hence become linked to the attitude representation. Based on this reasoning, in Study 4 we tested the effects of perceived ownership on a personalized IAT and a traditional IAT. If metacognitive inferences change implicit associations in this way, then perceiving an implicit evaluation as one’s own attitude should make it more likely to be detected by a personalized IAT. The same relationship should not hold for the standard IAT, because it does not distinguish between personal and extra-personal associations. These studies help advance the theoretical debates over the role of ownership in implicit attitudes. In agreement with Nosek and Hansen (2008) and Banaji, Nosek… (), our findings suggest that ownership can be conferred by conscious metacognitive inferences, holding the automatic association constant. However, unlike Nosek and Banaji and colleagues, we suggest that those inferences can be meaningfully drawn about implicit evaluations as well as explicit evaluations. The inferences are meaningful in that they have downstream consequences. One consequence is that inferences about ownership contribute to the differences between associations detected by the personalized IAT versus the traditional IAT. This provides Who owns implicit attitudes 10 additional evidence for the validity of the personal versus extra-personal distinction and the use of the personalized IAT to measure it (Olson and Fazio, 2004). Experiment 1 Our research strategy was first to measure individual differences in automatic evaluations, and then to manipulate experimentally whether participants considered that evaluation to reflect their own attitudes. We then measured attitudes explicitly. If our hypotheses are correct, then considering an automatic evaluation as one’s own attitude should lead participants to report explicit attitudes that are consistent with the automatic response. Disowning the evaluation should lead to less consistency. The present experiments studied attitudes toward gay men, for several reasons. First, prejudice against a stigmatized group highlights cases in which people may be motivated to consider their implicit responses to reflect something outside of their own attitudes and beliefs. In previous studies in our laboratory we have observed wide variability in explicit heterosexism among our student population. Heterosexism therefore provides an ideal test case to illustrate the malleability in prejudice that might result from metacognitive inferences about attitudes. Finally, this topic is salient and meaningful to our subject population because these studies were conducted in the months preceding a controversial referendum to amend the North Carolina constitution to prohibit recognition of any form of same sex relationship. Demonstrating that even hotly debated, salient explicit attitudes are malleable as a function of ownership inferences highlights the importance of such inferences. Method Participants Who owns implicit attitudes 11 Participants were 40 undergraduate students (31 women and 9 men) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They received partial course credit for participation. Procedure Participants were seated at one of six individual computers enclosed in cubicles for privacy. After providing informed consent, participants completed demographic questions and then completed the implicit measure of attitudes. After completing the implicit measure, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they were encouraged to interpret their affective feelings during the implicit test as reflecting their personal attitudes or as attitudes separate from the self. Finally, participants completed the explicit measure of attitudes and were debriefed. Implicit measurement. Participants completed the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005) to measure implicit responses to same-sex and crosssex couples. This task was selected because priming tasks avoid the task-switching demands and dual-response mapping that is a source of controversy in interpretations of the IAT. Moreover, the AMP demonstrates large effect sizes and high reliability, making it an effective and efficient measure of individual differences in automatic responses (see Cameron, Brown-Iannuzzi, & Payne, 2012; Payne, Burkley, & Stokes, 2008). The task included 64 trials in which a photo prime was presented for 125 ms, followed by a Chinese symbol for 100 ms, followed by a black and white pattern mask that remained on the screen until a response was made. Participants were warned that the primes could influence their judgments and they were instructed to try their best to ignore photo primes and to make judgments based solely on how pleasant or unpleasant they found the Chinese symbols to be. Participants pressed the “L” key to indicate “pleasant” and the “A” key to indicate “unpleasant.” Who owns implicit attitudes 12 The photos used as primes were 16 photos of same-sex male couples, and 16 photos of cross-sex couples as control primes. Participants saw each photo prime twice. The poses included embraces, kisses, and holding hands but did not display nudity or sexual activity. The photos were matched so that the same poses were represented equally often for same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Ownership manipulation. After completing the implicit measure, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. The personal inference group was encouraged to consider their spontaneous feelings during the priming task to be their own actual attitude. The extra-personal inference group was encouraged to consider their feelings as something other than their own actual attitude. To manipulate perceived ownership we drew on prior findings that simply considering a particular hypothesis makes people more likely to believe that it is true. For example, participants who learned that Jane acted like an extrovert in some situations but an introvert in other situations rated Jane as more suitable for a job as a real estate agent when asked to consider the hypothesis that she is extroverted (Snyder & Cantor, 1979). In contrast, they rated her as more suitable for a job as a librarian when asked to consider the hypothesis that she is introverted. Such findings illustrate the confirmation bias, a robust tendency for people to confirm whatever hypothesis they entertain rather than disconfirm it. The bias is believed to result from selectively searching for hypothesis-consistent evidence (Nickerson, 1998). We took advantage of the confirmation bias by asking participants either to consider reasons that their feelings during the implicit task reflect their own attitudes or to consider reasons that their feelings do NOT reflect their own attitudes. The following instructions were used to manipulate metacognitive inferences: Who owns implicit attitudes 13 While completing the picture task, you may have had a "gut feeling" towards the pictures of heterosexuals and homosexuals. Research has found that this gut feeling usually reflects [does NOT reflect] people's genuine attitude towards homosexuality… We are interested in how people generate reasons for their feelings. People can often generate reasons why their feelings either do or do not reflect their actual attitudes. For the purpose of this study, we'd like you to write two to three (2-3) reasons why the feelings you felt during the picture task ARE [are NOT] your own attitude... Finally, participants completed the Modern Homophobia Scale to assess explicit attitudes (MHS; Raja & Stokes, 1998). The scale includes separate subscales for attitudes toward lesbians and gay men, but in all experiments we only assessed attitudes toward gay men. Participants responded to 22 items on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Items included questions about affective discomfort, (e.g., “I am comfortable with the thought of two men being romantically involved” [reverse scored]), belief that homosexuality is deviant (e.g., “Male homosexuality is a psychological disease”) discriminatory behaviors, (e.g., “I would remove my child from class if I found out the teacher was gay”), and policy-related attitudes (e.g., “Marriages between gay men should be legal” [reverse scored]). Results and Discussion No participants reported the ability to read the Chinese characters. However, three participants pressed the same key on all trials and were excluded from analyses, leaving a final sample of 37. Mean AMP scores in the pre-test displayed significant levels of bias. The proportion of pleasant responses was much higher on heterosexual prime trials (M = .86, SD = .15) than homosexual prime trials (M = .46, SD = .30), F (1, 36) = 47.47, p < .001. Our primary hypothesis was that explicit attitude reports would be more consistent with implicit attitudes among participants encouraged to own their implicit responses than among those encouraged to disown their implicit responses. We created AMP scores for each participant by taking the difference between the proportion of pleasant responses on heterosexual prime Who owns implicit attitudes 14 trials versus homosexual prime trials (higher scores reflect a preference for heterosexual over homosexual couples). We then tested the hypothesis by estimating the parameters of a regression model predicting explicit attitudes from implicit attitudes and the implicit attitude x condition interaction. All variables were standardized prior to analysis. Figure 1 displays the regression slopes relating implicit and explicit attitudes in each condition. The main effect was significant neither for implicit attitudes, b = .14, p = .44, nor for ownership condition, b = -.10, p = .57. The predicted interaction, however, was significant, b = .39, p < .05. The implicit-explicit correlation was significant in the personal condition, r = .53, p < .05 but not in the extra-personal condition, r = -.21, p = .39. Simple slopes analysis showed that among participants with high levels of implicit bias (estimated at 1 SD above the mean) those in the personal inference condition scored .98 standard deviations higher in explicit homophobia than those in the extra-personal inference condition. These effects illustrate that metacognitive inferences of ownership can have dramatic consequences for explicit attitudes. These results supported the hypothesis that when automatically activated evaluations are interpreted as one’s own attitudes, they serve as a basis for explicit evaluations. When they are disowned, they became largely irrelevant for explicit evaluations. This pattern supports the idea that metacognitive inferences about ownership shape the downstream consequences of implicit cognition. One potential concern over the manipulation in Experiment 1 is that by directly instructing participants to generate reasons why their implicit response is or is not their own attitude, we may have induced experimental demand. Participants may have felt pressure to respond in ways that were consistent or inconsistent with their affective responses. To address this possibility, in Experiment 2 we replicated these findings by measuring individual differences Who owns implicit attitudes 15 in perceived ownership rather than manipulating it. If naturally existing variability in perceptions of ownership display the same effects then we can have greater confidence in our findings. Experiment 2 The materials and procedure for Experiment 2 were the same as Experiment 1 except that there was no manipulation of ownership inferences. Instead we measured individual differences in perceptions of ownership. Participants Participants were 45 undergraduate students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Three participants who reported being able to read Chinese were removed from the sample, leaving a final sample of 42 participants (14 men and 28 women). Procedure After providing informed consent, participants completed a demographic questionnaire and then completed the same AMP as in Experiment 1. Next they were asked to think about how they felt when they saw the photo primes and then answer questions about their feelings. Specifically, they were instructed, “Now consider the ‘gut feelings’ you had toward the pictures of homosexuals. The following questions ask about how much you think these feelings reflect your genuine attitude toward homosexuals. That is, do these gut feelings reflect your own views?” They responded to the following three items on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree): “My immediate feelings reflect my own beliefs about homosexuals,” “My gut reactions reflect my genuine attitude toward homosexuals,” and “My gut reactions have nothing to do with my real attitude toward gay people” (reverse scored). Finally, participants completed the Modern Homophobia Scale to measure explicit attitudes and then were debriefed. Results and Discussion Who owns implicit attitudes 16 Average AMP responses were analyzed using a repeated measures ANOVA. The proportion of pleasant responses was much greater on heterosexual prime trials (M = .80, SD = .16) than on homosexual prime trials (M = .42, SD = .28), F (1, 41) = 52.29, p < .001. To examine the effects of perceived ownership on the implicit-explicit relationship we estimated the parameters of a regression analysis predicting explicit homophobia from implicit attitudes, perceived ownership, and their interaction. All variables were standardized using zscores prior to the analysis. The main effect of implicit attitudes was significant, b = .54, t = 3.79, p < .001, but the main effect of perceived ownership was not, b = .02, t = .16, p = .88. Critically, the predicted interaction was significant, b = .42, t = 3.15, p < .01, indicating that perceived ownership moderated implicit-explicit consistency. The simple slopes relating AMP scores to explicit homophobia at high and low levels of perceived ownership are displayed in Figure 2. Simple slopes analysis showed that the association between implicit and explicit attitudes was significant at high levels of perceived ownership (1 SD above the mean), b = .96, t = 5.86, p < .001. However implicit and explicit attitudes were not significantly related at low levels of perceived ownership (1 SD below the mean), b = .12, t = .57, p = .57. We next examined the effects of perceived ownership separately for individuals with high and low levels of implicit bias (+/- 1 SD from the mean). Among participants with high levels of implicit bias, greater perceived ownership was significantly associated with greater levels of explicit homophobia, b = 0.44, t=2.24, p < 0.05. In contrast, among those with low levels of implicit bias perceived ownership was associated with significantly lower levels of explicit homophobia, b = -0.40, t = -2.13, p < .05. Who owns implicit attitudes 17 These findings suggest that perceived ownership is a powerful moderator of the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes, replicating the results of Experiment 1. Unlike Experiment 1, this study relied on naturally occurring variability in perceived ownership, making it unlikely that effects were driven by experimental demand. Together, these studies provide converging evidence that metacognitive inferences of ownership shape the consequences of automatic evaluations for explicit attitudes. Experiment 3 Although Experiments 1 and 2 established the role of manipulated and measured inferences of ownership, they do not rule out the possibility that other factors that are correlated with ownership may have influenced the findings. In particular, some authors have suggested that ownership may go hand in hand with endorsement of an attitude as true or valid. In our next experiment we sought to disentangle the effects of perceived ownership from perceived validity, as well as providing affirmative evidence for the role of perceived ownership in mediating these effects. In this study we combined the designs of the first two experiments by manipulating ownership inferences and also measuring perceptions of ownership as a mediator. Moreover, we measured perceived validity of implicit evaluations so that we could assess the effects of ownership and validity independently. Our main hypothesis was that the manipulation of ownership would affect implicit-explicit attitude consistency (replicating Experiment 1) and that this effect would be mediated by the measure of perceived ownership (but not perceived validity) of implicit responses. Method Participants Who owns implicit attitudes 18 Seventy-six undergraduates participated in return for partial course credit. Data from 3 participants who reported being able to read Chinese pictographs were dropped from analyses, leaving a final sample of 73 (46 women and 27 men). Procedure As in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, participants began by completing an AMP measuring implicit attitudes toward same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Participants were then randomly assigned to generate reasons that their feelings either reflected personal attitudes or extra-personal attitudes. The manipulation was the same as in Experiment 1. As a measure of our proposed mediator, participants next answered the same three questions used in Experiment 2 to assess the degree to which they owned their implicit attitudes. In addition to perceived ownership, we measured perceived validity of respondents’ implicit attitudes using three additional questions. The instructions for these items read, “Still considering the "gut feelings" you had toward the pictures of homosexuals, the following questions ask about how much you think these feelings are valid or correct.” They then rated their agreement on a 7point scale to the following items: “My gut reactions reflect accurate beliefs about homosexuals; my gut reactions do NOT necessarily reflect true beliefs about homosexuals (reverse scored); my immediate reactions toward homosexuals are valid.” Internal consistency was adequate for both perceived ownership (alpha = .72) and perceived validity (alpha = .84). Next, participants completed the Modern Homophobia Scale to measure explicit attitudes. After completing the explicit measure, participants were asked to reflect on the attitudes that they expressed on that scale and to answer the same items measuring perceived ownership and perceived validity about their explicitly reported attitudes. This provided a basis Who owns implicit attitudes 19 for comparing metacognitions about implicit and explicit attitudes directly. Following this, participants were debriefed about the purpose of the study. Results and Discussion Mean implicit attitudes Replicating the previous studies, the proportion of pleasant responses was greater on heterosexual prime trials (M = .76, SD = .18) than on homosexual prime trials (M = .46, SD = .29), F (1, 71) = 47.29, p < .001. Moderated mediation We hypothesized that perceived ownership of implicit responses should mediate the effects of the ownership manipulation on implicit-explicit attitude correspondence. Statistically, this implies a pattern of moderated mediation (Preacher, Rucker, & Hayes, 2007). That is, we expected the manipulation of ownership to affect perceived ownership, which in turn should affect explicit attitudes. However, increasing perceived ownership of implicit responses should have differing consequences for individuals with high versus low implicit bias. For individuals with high implicit bias, experimentally increasing ownership should increase explicit prejudice and this should be mediated by perceived ownership. But the experimental manipulation should have little effect for participants with low levels of implicit bias. The following analyses used the bootstrapping method of Preacher and Hayes (2007) to test for moderated mediation. The analysis simultaneously estimates the effect of the manipulation on the proposed mediator, as well as the interaction between the mediator and a moderating factor. If these effects are significant, one can probe the conditional indirect effects, which indicate whether the manipulation has an indirect effect via the mediator (perceived ownership), at different levels of the moderator (implicit bias). Following the recommendations Who owns implicit attitudes 20 of Hayes () we report the findings in three steps. First, we demonstrate that the manipulation of perceived ownership affected the measure of perceived ownership. Second, we demonstrate that perceived ownership moderated the association between implicit and explicit attitudes (replicating Experiment 2). Third, we test for a conditional indirect effect. We used 10,000 bootstrap re-samples to estimate the coefficients, which are displayed in Table 1. Effects of manipulation on perceived attitude ownership. As predicted, participants in the personal-inference group reported greater ownership of implicit responses (M = 5.04, SD = 1.21) than those in the extrapersonal-inference group (M = 4.27, SD = 1.34), b = 2.32, p = .01. Effect of perceived ownership in moderating implicit-explicit attitude correspondence. The Perceived ownership X AMP interaction was significant when predicting explicit attitudes, b = 3.66, p < .01. As depicted in Figure 3, implicit and explicit attitudes were more strongly related among participants who perceived their implicit responses to reflect their own attitudes. Conditional Indirect effects via perceived ownership. Thus far the analysis demonstrates that perceived ownership moderated implicit-explicit attitude consistency, and that our manipulation significantly influenced perceived ownership. Probing the conditional indirect effects revealed a significant indirect effect of the manipulation on explicit attitudes, via perceived ownership, among participants high in implicit bias, b = .15, p = .055. There were no significant indirect effects for participants with average levels of bias, b = .06, p = .111 nor low levels of bias, b = -.03, p = .447. Note that 1 SD below the mean for AMP scores represents a score of -.07, which is not significantly different from zero. Low bias in this sample thus represents neutral or indifferent attitudes rather than pro-gay bias. Because of this, it is not surprising that changes in perceived ownership did not increase or decrease explicit attitudes Who owns implicit attitudes 21 among participants with low levels of implicit bias. The full moderated mediation model is depicted in Figure 5. Among participants with relatively negative implicit responses toward gays, the personal inference condition increased the extent to which they perceived their implicit responses as their own attitudes. Perceptions of ownership, in turn, tended to increase the expression of anti-gay attitudes on the explicit measure. These effects were not evident among participants with moderate or low levels of implicit bias. Together these effects replicate the findings of Experiments 1 and 2, and demonstrate that when individuals infer that their implicit responses reflect their own attitudes, these metacognitive inferences affect explicitly stated attitudes. Perceived Validity A parallel bootstrapping analysis was conducted to examine the mediating role of perceived validity. Perceived validity did not reproduce the same effects as perceived ownership. Perceived validity was not significantly higher in the personal-inference group (M = 4.49, SD = 1.36) than the extrapersonal inference group (M = 4.10, SD = 1.29), b = .15, p = .20. Thus, the manipulation selectively affected ownership. Next, we examined the conditional indirect effects of perceived validity. The indirect effect of the manipulation on explicit attitudes, via perceived validity was non-significant at low implicit bias, b = -.02, p = .50, as well as at high levels of implicit bias, b = .08, p = .22. Thus, there was no evidence that perceived validity, rather than perceived ownership, was responsible for the effects we observed. Although perceptions of validity were not affected by the manipulation, individual differences in perceived validity did significantly moderate the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes. As displayed in Figure 4, implicit and explicit attitudes were highly correlated for participants who perceived their implicit responses to be valid (b = .98, p < .001), but the Who owns implicit attitudes 22 relationship was weaker for those who perceived them as less valid (b = .36, p = .02). This finding is consistent with the APE model (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006) and the metacognitive model (Petty, Brinol, & DeMarree, 2007), which suggest that metacognitive inferences about the validity of one’s attitudes are an important factor differentiating implicit and explicit attitudes. However, this finding does not conflict with our hypothesis that perceived ownership has moderating effects distinct from perceived validity. Experiment 4 The preceding experiments provided evidence that metacognitions about ownership shape whether implicit attitudes are expressed explicitly. However there is reason to expect that such metacognitions also affect implicitly activated attitudes themselves. Inferring that a particular attitude is one’s own may entail forming an association between the attitude object and one’s own likes and dislikes. Over time, these associations may influence not only explicit reports, but also automatically activated evaluations. In our final experiment we tested whether perceived ownership would moderate whether implicit evaluations were detected on an implicit test designed to measure personal associations. To this end, we compared responses on Olson and Fazio’s (2004) personalized IAT to the standard IAT. Following the format of the previous studies, we first measured implicit attitudes toward gay men using the AMP. Next, we measured perceived ownership using the same items as experiments 2 and 3. Finally, we assessed implicit attitudes toward gay men using either the personalized or standard IAT (randomly assigned between subjects). We predicted that the personalized IAT would be sensitive to implicit attitudes measured by the AMP only when participants perceived them as their own. In contrast, we did not expect perceived ownership to Who owns implicit attitudes 23 moderate the effect for the standard IAT because it is thought to reflect both personal and extrapersonal associations. Method Participants One hundred eighteen undergraduates participated in return for course credit. Seven participants reported the ability to read Chinese characters, three additional participants pressed the same key on all trials of the AMP, and one participant was considered an outlier due to an IAT score more than three standard deviations above the mean. After removing these, the final sample included 107 participants. Procedure The first two parts of the experiment were identical to Experiment 2. Participants completed the AMP and then answered three questions assessing perceived ownership over the feelings they experienced during the task. Next, participants were randomly assigned to complete either the personalized IAT or the standard IAT. The IAT’s each used the same photos of same sex and cross-sex couples as in the AMP. For the personal IAT, … For the standard IAT… Need details re: stimuli, judgment task, block structure, and number of trials, and order info, etc. Following the IAT, participants completed the Modern Homophobia Scale to assess explicit attitudes. Because our previous studies showed that ownership inferences affected explicit attitudes, we controlled for the MHS to ensure that any effects observed on implicit measures were not due to shared variance with explicit attitudes. Results and Discussion Preliminary analyses Who owns implicit attitudes 24 IAT scores were computed using the D score method (Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003). AMP scores were computed by subtracting the proportion of pleasant judgments on straight prime trials from the proportion pleasant on gay prime trials. All implicit measures showed anti-gay bias that was significantly greater than zero. Average IAT scores were M = .79, SD = .72, t(52) = 7.99, p < .001 for the personal IAT, and M = .76, SD = .66, t(53) = 8.34, p < .001 for the standard IAT. Average AMP scores were M = .37, SD = .40, t(106) = 9.64, p < .001 (if scored as a d-score the effect size is .93, similar to the IAT’s {Check this}). Moreover, AMP and both IAT’s were significantly correlated (AMP-personal IAT r = .57; AMP-standard IAT r = .44), p’s < .001. Primary analyses Our main hypothesis was that inferences of ownership would moderate the relationship between AMP scores and personal IAT scores, but not standard IAT scores. We tested the hypothesis by estimating the parameters of a regression model in which IAT scores were the dependent variable. On the first step we entered a dummy code indicating whether the participant completed the personal or standard IAT, along with AMP scores, perceived ownership, and explicit attitude scores as a covariate. On the second step we entered all two-way interactions, and on the third step we entered the three way interaction between IAT condition, AMP scores, and perceived ownership. Our hypothesis predicts a three-way interaction in which the AMP x perceived ownership interaction is significant in the personal IAT condition but not the standard IAT condition. As displayed in Table 2, AMP scores and explicit attitudes were both significant predictors of IAT scores. Most importantly, the predicted three-way interaction was significant. To decompose the interaction, we examined the AMP x perceived ownership interaction Who owns implicit attitudes 25 separately for the personal and standard IAT’s. As displayed in Figure 6, perceived ownership moderated the relationship between the AMP and the personalized IAT (at marginally significant levels, b = .18, p = .07). Simple slopes analyses showed that … Perceived ownership did not moderate the association between the AMP and the standard IAT, b = -.08, p = .39. These results indicate that inferences of ownership had consequences for whether implicit evaluations measured by the AMP were reflected in other implicit measures. Perceived ownership moderated the effects of implicit bias on the personalized IAT, which is designed to measure personal associations, but not the standard IAT, which may measure both personal and extra-personal associations. These effects were independent of explicit attitudes. Together, these results suggest that inferences about ownership affect not only explicit expression of attitudes, but also implicit evaluations themselves. General Discussion We presented evidence that inferences about the ownership of implicit responses have important consequences for whether those implicit responses function like personal attitudes – both explicitly and implicitly. When participants disowned their implicit responses, they reported explicit attitudes that were only weakly associated with implicit responses. In contrast, when they judged their implicit responses to reflect their own attitudes, implicit and explicit attitudes were highly associated. The moderating effects of ownership inferences were dramatic. Across the three studies, the average implicit-explicit attitude correlation was r = .09 in the low ownership conditions (i.e., the extra-personal inference group in Experiment 1, and at 1 SD below the mean of perceived ownership in Experiments 2 and 3), whereas it was r = .82 in high ownership conditions (i.e., the personal inference group in Experiment 1, and at 1 SD above the mean of perceived ownership Who owns implicit attitudes 26 in Experiments 2 and 3). When participants perceived their implicit responses to be their own, their implicit and explicit attitudes were, in fact, nearly identical. Yet when disowned, implicit responses were almost entirely unrelated to explicit reports. Still, owning an evaluation does more than simply lead people to explicitly report their attitudes. Ownership inferences rendered attitudes toward gay men more closely related to participants’ personal likes and dislikes, as opposed to general semantic categories of good and bad. This may have been due to a momentary construal as emphasized by the APE model (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006) and the Situated Inference Model (Loersch & Payne, 2011). Alternatively, it may be due to stored traces of the inference process. Much as the MCM suggests that people encode and store validity tags, they may also store the traces of other metacognitive processes. If so, the present results might suggest the existence of “ownership tags.” More research is needed, as our Experiment 4 does not distinguish between these two possibilities. Either way, our results are the first to suggest that ownership-as-metacognition (Banaji…, Gawronski…) and ownership-as-associations (Olson & Fazio, 2004) are not necessarily incompatible. In fact, metacognitive inferences of ownership may be one mechanism by which representations of an attitude object come to be linked with personal or extra-personal evaluations. Implications for the nature of implicit and explicit social cognition The effects reported are consistent with dual process theories that emphasize metacognitive inferences about implicit attitudes (Hofmann & Wilson, 2010; Gawronski & Bodenhausem, 2006; Petty, Brinol, & DeMarree, 2007). Those theories have tended to emphasize metacognitions about the validity of implicit responses, and the present data support the importance of validity inferences. However, the present data also suggest an expansion of Who owns implicit attitudes 27 these theoretical perspectives by highlighting that other kinds of inferences besides validity may also be critical. Inferences about validity essentially ask, “is my attitude correct?” We have focused here on inferences of ownership (i.e., “is this attitude my own?”), but other kinds of inferences may also be important. For example, independent of these other inferences, people might make inferences about whether they like or dislike their automatic responses (e.g., “I spontaneously feel negative affect toward gay men but I wish I didn’t”). Similar post-hoc inferences might be made regarding whether an individual intends or endorses the ideas that have come automatically to mind. Intention is one of the key criteria that distinguish automatic processes from controlled processes (Bargh, 1994). And endorsement has long been a critical factor in distinguishing between implicit and explicit attitudes (Devine, 1989). Nonetheless, research on the experience of agency suggests that people sometimes engage in post-hoc inferences about whether they intended to perform an action (Wegner, Fuller, & Sparrow, 2003) or whether they authored an idea (Preston & Wegner, 2007). Such findings highlight that intent and endorsement can be consequences of automatic processes rather than their cause. The present findings suggest that such inferences may be important for the explicit responses that follow from automatic processes. Post-hoc inferences about whether one intends or endorses ideas that come automatically to mind may shape whether those ideas are overtly expressed. Considering the variety of metacognitive inferences one could make when reflecting on their own automatic responses highlights other new possibilities as well. Simple affective responses such as those measured in the AMP and other implicit measures might be interpreted in a variety of ways by the person completing the task. Recent theories of emotion hold that simple good/bad affective reactions take on the specific qualities of discrete emotions once they Who owns implicit attitudes 28 are categorized as a particular emotion by the perceiver (Barrett, 2006; Lindquist & Barrett, 2008). For instance, negative affect experienced toward gay targets during the task could be interpreted either as disliking them, or as feelings of discomfort about an unfamiliar group, or even sympathetic distress for members of a stigmatized group. Consistent with this idea, one study found that perceiving a group to be dislikeable produced the same “negative” scores on an IAT as perceiving the group to be the blameless victim of oppression (Uhlmann, Brescoll, & Paluck, 2006). Our metacognitive perspective suggests that the affective responses assessed by implicit tests may in some cases not differentiate between a range of qualitatively different emotions. Metacognitive inferences, however, may transform simple affective valence into specific and nuanced emotions. Such different appraisals of equally negative valence might have very different behavioral consequences. Future research should explore how qualitatively different metacognitive inferences about a single affective reaction might lead to a diversity of emotional and behavioral effects. Real prejudice? In an influential critique of implicit bias research, Arkes and Tetlock (2004) argued that implicit bias should only be considered to be prejudice in a socially and morally meaningful sense if it reflects “personal animus,” but not if it reflects “shared cultural stereotypes,” (p. 257). Setting aside the fact that this claim is itself controversial (), our findings suggest that any claims about the distinction between personal versus non-personal nature of implicit attitudes should be made with caution. Imagine two individuals who both have an equivalently high level of implicit bias. One person assumes that the negative feelings reflect his personal attitudes, but the other does not. Should such metacognitive inferences matter for whether we consider these evaluations Who owns implicit attitudes 29 to be prejudice? We suggest that they should not, especially since the inferences can be made post-hoc rather than having a causal role in forming the evaluation. Metacognitive inferences about ownership might have other indirect effects, however, that are relevant for whether an implicit bias is morally or socially consequential. For example, we found that manipulating inferences about ownership affected participants’ explicit attitude reports, including endorsement of discriminatory behaviors and policies. These results suggest that even if ownership is inferred post-hoc, it is not simply a passive observer or epiphenomenon. The inferences participants made at one moment had consequences for their explicit endorsements a moment later. Most theorists, of course, agree that explicit endorsement qualifies as morally and socially relevant. From our point of view, both automatic evaluation and metacognitive inferences about it function as component processes -- neither of which is morally blameworthy itself -- which give rise to more complex emergent effects. We suggest that explicit endorsement (or rejection) is one part of a potentially complex cycle which may itself provide feedback that modifies associations in memory. The line between personal animus and cultural knowledge, therefore, cannot easily be drawn in a simple or permanent way. The same evaluative association might be construed as personal at one moment, and in this case would indeed function as a personal attitude. The next moment, it may be construed differently and therefore function differently. Who owns implicit attitudes 30 Who owns implicit attitudes 31 References Arkes, H. R., & Tetlock, P. E. (2004). Attributions of Implicit Prejudice, or 'Would Jesse Jackson 'Fail' the Implicit Association Test?'. Psychological Inquiry, 15(4), 257-278. Banaji, M. 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Who owns implicit attitudes 35 TABLE 1 Moderated Mediation of Implicit- Explicit Attitude Correspondence Mediator Variable Model: Outcome = Perceived ownership Predictor Ownership condition B .29 SE .11 t 2.57 P .012 Dependent Variable Model: Outcome = Explicit homophobia Predictor Ownership condition Perceived ownership AMP Perceived Ownership x AMP B -.01 .21 .50 .30 SE .08 .09 .10 .11 t .20 2.41 4.92 2.74 P .839 .019 .000 .008 Conditional Indirect Effects Low bias (-1 SD) High bias (+1 SD) Indirect B Bootstrap SE 95% confidence interval -.03 .15 .03 .08 (-.11, .03) (.03, .34) Note. Significant effects are in bold type. Who owns implicit attitudes 36 Author Note Correspondence should be directed to Keith Payne, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Campus Box 3270, Chapel Hill, NC 27599. Email: [email protected]. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation 0924252. Who owns implicit attitudes 37 Footnote Who owns implicit attitudes 38 Figure Captions Figure 1. Influence of ownership manipulation on correspondence between implicit and explicit attitudes, Experiment 1. Figure 2. Moderating effect of perceived attitude ownership on correspondence between implicit and explicit attitudes, Experiment 2. Figure 3. Moderating effect of perceived attitude ownership on correspondence between implicit and explicit attitudes, Experiment 3. Figure 4. Moderating effect of perceived attitude validity on correspondence between implicit and explicit attitudes, Experiment 3. Figure 5. Moderated mediation showing that ownership condition indirectly affected explicit attitudes via perceived ownership, conditional upon implicit bias in AMP scores. * p < .05, ** p < .01, Experiment 3. Who owns implicit attitudes 39 Figure 1. Who owns implicit attitudes 40 Figure 2. Who owns implicit attitudes 41 Figure 3. Who owns implicit attitudes 42 Figure 4. Who owns implicit attitudes 43 Figure 5.