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Chapter 3: Religious Language and Implicit Political Cognition
Bethany Albertson
University of Chicago
[email protected]
Woodrow Wilson School
Robertson Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
This chapter explores attitude change in response to religious language in
political speech. Although politicians frequently use religious references, the
effectiveness and mechanisms of persuasion are unknown. I make a case that
religious language can affect political attitudes through implicit processes, or
processes through which the individual is unaware because for many
Americans religious attachments are formed early, and religious socialization
continues throughout their lives. I also hypothesize that religious language
affects people at an explicit level and that these processes do not always move
in concordance. I test these hypotheses experimentally and I find support for
the hypothesis that religious language affects attitudes at an implicit level, while
results on the explicit measures are inconclusive.
Public officials and political candidates frequently use religious language in their appeals to
the American public. Chapters 2 explored the ways that religious language when coded by its
specificity reaches some people while others remain oblivious to the religious content of the
language. This chapter explores another possible route to persuasion: that religious language can
affect political attitudes through implicit processes. The last chapter argued that language can have
religious content that eludes some individuals; this chapter argues that religious language can reach
people beneath their level of awareness. Because religious attachments are often formed early in life
and are subject to a lifetime of socialization, I expect that religious language is particularly capable of
affecting Americans’ attitudes through uncontrolled processes. This chapter explores the distinction
between implicit and explicit attitudes, and argues that studying implicit cognition is a valuable
addition to the study of political attitudes. Relying on recent literature on the malleability of implicit
attitudes, I hypothesize that religious language from a politician can alter attitudes through implicit
processes. I test this hypothesis experimentally, with a widely used implicit measure (the Implicit
Association Test), and present preliminary evidence that supports my hypothesis. Finally, I explain
the implications of attitude change at the implicit level for mass public opinion and political
behavior.
Mendelberg (2001) calls attention to the importance of implicit messages in racial appeals.
In this work, racial priming functions through uncontrolled, automatic processes. When the racial
component is made explicit, Mendelberg argues, the norm of racial equality constrains whites’
reactions. This chapter builds on Mendelberg’s work by altering the nature of the appeal (religious
instead of racial) and by focusing on implicit reactions to explicit messages. Implicit cognition plays
an important role in reactions to both implicit and explicit messages. While in the case of racial
appeals, the explicitness of the message might allow a norm of equality to override racial priming, in
most cases the effect of implicit and explicit cognition is not an either/or phenomenon.
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Implicit and explicit attitudes
Social psychologists have long recognized that there are both explicit and implicit routes to
attitude formation and change, but these ideas are enjoying renewed attention in the field (Wegner
and Bargh 1998). Bargh and Chartland argue that “most of a person’s everyday life is determined
not by their conscious intentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes that are put into
motion by features of the environment that operate outside of conscious awareness and guidance.”
(1999, 462). Greenwald and Banaji (1995) distinguish implicit from explicit cognition through level
of awareness: “An implicit C is the introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) trace of
past experience which mediates R. In this template, C is the label for a construct (such as attitude),
and R names the category of responses (such as object-evaluative judgments) assumed to be
influenced by that construct.” (5) These past experiences include associations that individuals pick
up from their environment: they might be continually reinforced, and ultimately affect choices and
behavior. Conversely, an explicit route to attitude formation or change is one that the subject is
aware of. For example, Correll et. al. (2002) had subjects play a “shooter game” 1 , in which they were
presented with pictures of armed and unarmed men. They found that both white and African
American subjects were more likely to “shoot” an unarmed man when the target was black than
when the target was white. This effect was unrelated to personal endorsements of negative racial
stereotype or prejudice. Instead, the authors argue, these split second decisions are related to prior
exposure to negative stereotypes.
Implicit cognition can affect behaviors, such as a decision to shoot, or more basic
evaluations. One classic example of an implicit route to attitude formation is mere exposure. Mere
exposure is the idea that positive attitudes form simply through repeated exposure to a novel
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A shooter game asks subjects to “shoot” when they view a picture of a man holding a gun by striking a designated
key on a computer. Subjects respond to a series of pictures of men who hold either a gun, or an innocuous object
(cell phone, soda can, camera or wallet). The men are either white or African American.
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attitude object (Zajonc 1968). For example, a field experiment by Moreland and Beach (1992)
manipulated the frequency of classroom attendance of four women who, through pre-testing, were
found to be equally attractive. In a large class, these women visited 0, 5, 10, or 15 times, posing as
students but not interacting with others. During the last week of class, students were shown
pictures of the four women, and asked to give their impressions. There were no differences in levels
of familiarity: few students remembered seeing these women, and familiarity did not vary with
frequency of attendance. However, consistent with the mere exposure hypothesis, the women who
attended more often were perceived as more attractive, even though students did not remember
seeing them. The mere exposure effect is attributed to the fact that repeated exposure strengthens
the representation of the novel attitude object (in this case, the women) in the students’ minds, and
the representation made it easier for the student to process their images. The positive feeling that
comes from heightened perceptual fluency is then associated with the novel attitude object. This is
implicit because the students had no idea that the representation was built up in their memories, and
in most cases did not recognize the women on a conscious level. Political campaigns might rely on
the mere exposure hypothesis when they bombard constituents with advertisements. Miller (1976)
found that frequent exposure to a political message enhanced attitudes, though the effect was
curvilinear. Too much exposure dampened attitudes, perhaps triggering a reactance effect, in which
people react negatively to a perceived threat to freedom of choice.
Another well studied implicit process is classical conditioning, which is pairing a novel
attitude object with something else that is already reacted to positively or negatively. Gorn (1982)
asked students to evaluate an advertisement for either beige or blue pens paired with either liked or
disliked music. He found that subjects who were exposed to either a beige or blue pen paired with
liked music selected that color when offered a free pen in either color. In the disliked music
condition, subject preferred the color that was not paired with music in the advertisement. Subjects
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were not aware that music affected their choices. The positive or negative feelings elicited by the
music became associated with the pens, without the students’ knowledge.
Research that explores the role of implicit cognition in consumer psychology is particularly
useful for thinking about electoral politics because politicians and businesses both engage in
marketing (Kotler and Kotler 1999). Though there are important distinctions between these two
worlds, political science can gain insights from consumer psychology studies of persuasion and
decision making. Recent studies demonstrate that both implicit and explicit attitudes have predictive
power in product choice (Maison et. al. 2004, Brunel et. al. 2004). These studies suggest that
implicit processes, such as positive associations with a brand that are not available to us at a
conscious level, affect consumer choice. Translating this work into politics, I expect that implicit
attitudes, such as positive associations with a political party or a religious identity, might also affect
political choices.
While Bargh and Chartland contend that most of our daily life is driven by automatic
processes, we might wonder if politics is an exception. However, recent research on implicit
processes demonstrates an important role for implicit cognition in the study of political attitudes and
choices. Building on work that shows concepts are linked through associative networks in our
minds, Lodge and Taber (2005) recently argued that concepts in these associative networks carry
affective charges that can be activated through uncontrolled processes. They find that primes of
politicians, political groups, and issues speed up evaluation of affectively congruent concepts. This
suggests that people have immediate, spontaneous affective responses to political information.
Todorov et. al. (2005) also demonstrate the importance of immediate reactions. Their research
shows that spontaneous trait inference, based solely on faces, correctly predicts vote choice better
than chance. Subjects were shown the faces of political competitors that they did not recognize:
their instant assessments of competence were related to the election outcome, and were linearly
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related to the margin of victory. This work does not suggest that citizens are on autopilot: rather, it
points to a role for implicit processes that does not overwhelm conscious or explicit processes, but
is a vital aspect of citizens’ decision making.
Significant research has been devoted to the relationship between implicit and explicit
attitudes (Maison et. al. 2003, Nosek et. al. 2002, McConnell and Liebold 2001). Implicit routes to
attitude formation and change might work in ways that are complimenting or contradicting explicit
processes. For example, an advertisement that included music might persuade via classical
conditioning, along with information about the pens that affect the consumer on a conscious level.
In this example, the implicit and explicit processes are complimentary. In the shooter study,
however, it appears that implicit and explicit processes did not operate in concordance: people who
did not endorse the negative African American stereotype explicitly still exhibited a racial bias in
their decisions to shoot, or not shoot at a potentially armed suspect. As Fazio and Olson argue
(2003), the interesting question regarding the relationship between implicit and explicit measures is
not if they are correlated, but when and for whom are they correlated.
Are implicit attitudes malleable?
Implicit attitudes and measures are commonly thought to be particularly stable (Bargh 1999).
For example, most Americans are exposed to negative stereotypes of African Americans as young
children, and continually reencounter these stereotypes throughout their lives (Blinder 2005).
Because these implicit associations have old roots, and continual reinforcement, they are particularly
difficult to change. These associations are thought to be insulated from outside pressures, which is
one reason why they are particularly valuable for studies of sensitive topics. The uncontrolled nature
of implicit measures insulates them from social desirability pressures. However, recent work
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demonstrates that implicit attitudes are more malleable than previously thought (for a review, see
Blair 2002).
A series of recent experiments demonstrate the malleability of implicit attitudes. The
following experiments rely on first presenting a treatment group with a stimulus designed to bring
certain ideas to mind, followed by implicit measures. Blair et. al. (2001) demonstrated that counter
stereotypical imagery (strong woman) lessens the association of the category “female” with words
representing weakness. Carpenter and Banaji (2001) also expose subjects to either a strong female
leader or a neutral prime, and then have them take two Implicit Association Tests (IATs):
associating male and female with strong and weak, and with good and bad (randomly ordered).
They also demonstrate that the strong woman prime reduces the association between women and
weakness, but on the second IAT they find the prime has no affect on positive and negative
evaluations.
In the study of racial attitudes, DasGupta and Greenwald (2001) have demonstrated that
biases against African Americans are reduced by priming subjects with admired African American
individuals and disliked white individuals. Implicit age attitudes also shifted in response to admired
elderly people and disliked young people. Finally, Rudman and Lee (2002) found that exposing
subjects to misogynous rap music strengthened negative associations with black men, and that
subjects’ level of prejudice did not moderate the relationship. On the other hand, prejudice did
moderate the relationship between exposure to rap music and explicit measures.
These findings suggest that a subset of a larger category can be made salient, which contrasts
the idea that people react to fixed categories of racial, age, or gender groups. Religious expression
from a political leader, or candidate might similarly bring to mind a positive image of him, making
that component of the individual more salient. In this formulation, the politician is not a stable
attitude object: rather, different aspects of the individual can be brought to mind. One implication
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of this work is that if the primed aspect of the larger category were more frequently encountered, the
overall attitude towards the category would shift. Consequently, encountering more “strong”
women should strengthen associations between women and strength, and more misogynous rap
music might strengthen associations between black men and a series of negative stereotypes.
I expect that a politician’s use of religious language will improve attitudes towards the
politician. In particular, I expect that this improvement will occur through both implicit and explicit
processes. As discussed in Chapter 1, the United States is a particularly religious country.
Additionally, the majority of Americans say that they want their political leaders to express religious
faith and prayer (Pew, Religion and Public Life Survey, 2003). Further, I expect that implicit
processes are particularly likely for religious persuasion, because most Americans are exposed to
religion early on in their lives, and many experience a lifetime of religious socialization. I
hypothesize that religious language taps into their religious associations, and improves impressions
of the politician. Similar to the DasGupta and Greenwald studies (2001), I expect that religious
language on the part of a politician is analogous to a liked member of a racial or age group: in US
politics, using religious language is putting your best face forward. Finally, I expect that the explicit
and implicit measures will be positively, but not strongly correlated. I hypothesis that implicit and
explicit routes to attitude change are distinct, but generally complimentary processes.
Implicit measures
Most public opinion research relies on explicit measures. With an explicit measure, the
subject is aware of what is being measured. For example, in order to assess a person’s feelings about
Bill Clinton, the researcher might simply ask, how do you feel about Bill Clinton? The question
might be open-ended, allowing respondents to volunteer their own answer. More likely, the
question is followed by response options. The approach seems perfectly reasonable; however, it is
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worthwhile to examine the assumptions of explicit measures. An explicit measure assumes that the
respondent has an attitude already constructed, or is able to form an attitude when asked. The
explicit measure assumes the respondent has access to the relevant information. Another major
assumption is that the respondent is willing to share his or her attitudes (Brunel et. al., 2004).
Finally, an explicit measure relies on a shared understanding of the question and response options. 2
Of course, not all explicit measures violate these assumptions equally, and even when an assumption
is violated, researchers might gain valuable information. For example, knowing that Americans
over-report voting behavior (Abelson, et. al., 2002) and that undergraduates under-report binge
drinking (Rasinski et. al., 2005) reveals that voting is valued amongst Americans, and that
undergraduates recognize a norm against drunkenness. Another benefit of explicit measures,
particularly those not hampered with social desirability concerns, is that often, we want to know
what a respondent says that they think and feel, whether they have correctly or incorrectly assessed
all of the relevant information in their conscious and subconscious. We might think that the attitude
that they can share with a survey researcher is similar to the attitude that they can share with their
friends or express on a ballot. A final strength of explicit measures is that they are relatively simple.
Wording and correct response options might not be obvious, but they generally do not involve the
elaborate set ups, or technical devices of implicit measures.
An implicit measure is designed to bypass the respondent’s own assessment. Implicit
measures do not rely on self reports: the individual knows he or she is involved in a study, but the
measure does not rely on the subject realizing that, for instance, length of response time is being
used to gauge qualities such as ease of information processing. Nosek et. al. (in press) explain the
distinction with the analogy of math skills. One way to gauge a person’s math skills is to ask them,
2
This problem occurred in the current study. When asked about their religious preference, several subjects
bypassed the response options “Protestant” and “Catholic”, and opted for “Other”, filling in either Christian or a
specific Protestant denomination. Without their willingness to volunteer information after selecting other, the study
would have lost valuable information.
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how good are you at math? Another way is to give them a math test. The first measure relies on a
self report, and the second bypasses the individual’s own assessment of his or her skills. Of course,
we might expect that people are better judges of their own attitudes than their own math skills.
However social pressures could influence the answers to both questions. Also, both attitudes and
math skills might be influenced by information that the respondent has forgotten, or
misremembered. Math skills and attitudes can have long histories, and it is entirely possible that
relevant information that we have picked up along the way has not remained accessible when it is
time to answer a survey question. Information may be stored and not accessible or we may have an
inaccurate memory of what is stored at the moment of the self report.
Implicit measures are used to measure implicit attitudes, but the two should not be confused.
Fazio and Olson (2003) correctly insist that caution is warranted in conflating implicit measures with
implicit attitudes. The information tapped with the implicit measure might also be implicit, meaning
that the individual is not aware of the information. The implicit measure might also tap information
that the individual is fully aware of. Most research theorizes about implicit processes, but the
implicit measure alone is not always sufficient. Taber and Lodge’s studies of hot cognition (2005)
clearly demonstrate automatic activation because the time lapse between stimulus and response does
not allow for conscious processing, which take 500 ms to develop. (462) Most implicit measures do
not benefit from such a clear litmus test. Many studies, including the current project, build a case
that implicit measures are capturing implicit processes based on theorizing, low correlations between
implicit and explicit measures, and other measures that demonstrate the subjects’ lack of awareness.
Neither implicit nor explicit measures capture the “true attitude”. An explicit measure can
only tap those aspects of the attitude that the individual has access to and is willing to share. Implicit
measures are constrained as well: similar to the math test that can only assess one’s math ability on a
certain set of questions, implicit measures can capture only some aspects of attitudes. Implicit
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measures might capture attitude accessibility through response latencies 3 , or the strength of
associations via matching tasks. Implicit and explicit measures regarding the same attitude object are
generally positively correlated, but have considerable independent variance. Based on a
demonstration web site, Nosek et. al. (2002) compare the relationship between the IAT and explicit
measures on a variety of attitudes and stereotypes. They find that these measures are almost always
positively correlated 4 , but that the strength of the relationship varies. Explicit and implicit measures
of preference for the young was loosely correlated (r = .08), while implicit and explicit candidate
preferences in the 2000 election had a stronger correlation (r= .52). 5
The independence of implicit and explicit measures is most obvious in the study of racial
attitudes, so it is not surprising that implicit measures have been most widely used in that area. One
reason for their independence is that the explicit measure is influenced by social desirability
pressures, while, arguably, the implicit measure is not. Explicit measures of racial attitudes reveal a
sharp decrease in the percentage of white Americans who support segregation, and believe in the
innate inferiority of African Americans since the 1950s (Sniderman and Piazza 1993). However,
though the vast majority of Americans say that they disagree with discriminatory policies and
behaviors, we know from studies such as the field experiments involving resumes with
stereotypically black or white sounding names (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004) that discrimination
still exists. While explicit measures show low levels of anti-black sentiment in the American
population, implicit measures generally reveal that most Americans demonstrate a preference for
whites over blacks (Greenwald and Banaji 1995). These differences might be due to the fact
3
A response latency is the amount of time that passes from the end of the question to the beginning of the
respondent’s answer. Latencies have been used to assess attitude accessibility (Bassilli 1995, Huckfeldt et. al.,
1999).
4
One notable exception to this trend is African American’s racial attitudes. Several studies have demonstrated that
African Americans demonstrate preference for black over white on explicit measures, but express mild preference
for white over black on implicit measures (Nosek et. al., 2002)
5
Unfortunately, the election data is only analyzed for the correlation between implicit and explicit measures in this
article. These data are drawn from a website version of the IAT that relies on self selection
(https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit).
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respondents are unwilling to express their true racist attitudes, or simply because the measures
capture different constructs: the explicit measure is a self reported attitude and the implicit measure
captures the strength of associations.
Implicit measures are a useful addition to our resources for studying political attitudes. First,
explicit measures are inadequate for capturing implicit processes (Greenwald and Banaji 1995).
Implicit measures can capture aspects of the attitude that elude self reports, such as the strength of
associations and accessibility. For example, Huckfeldt et. al (1999) used response latencies to tap the
accessibility of self reported partisanship and ideology. They find that both affect political attitudes,
but that the accessibility of partisanship and ideology moderates the relationship. Because the
explicit and implicit measures can each capture different underlying constructs, both related to the
attitude, both are useful measures of the effect of religious language on political attitudes. Implicit
measures also help political scientists to take a step back in their study of public opinion, and focus
on the associations that are a product of socialization. Finally, following the studies on consumer
psychology, I expect that they will have independent predictive power for studies of political choices
and behaviors.
The Implicit Association Test
The data presented in this chapter are drawn from an Implicit Association Test (IAT), which
has not yet been widely used in political science research. Research using the IAT was first
published in 1998 (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz), and the IAT has quickly become the most
widely used implicit measure in psychology (Fazio and Olson 2003). The IAT has been used to
study racial and ethnic attitudes (DasGupta et. al. 2003, Devine et. al. 2002, Greenwald et. al. 1998),
gender stereotypes (Rudman and Heppen 2003, Blair et. al. 2001), and attitudes towards the elderly
(Dasgupta and Greenwald 2001). The measure is based on the assumption that the ease with which
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people can pair two distinct concepts reflects the strength of the association between those concepts
in their mind. A typical IAT is administered on a computer, and begins by offering subjects two
categories, and a series of stimuli. The subject’s task is to assign each stimulus to the appropriate
category as quickly as possible. One category is assigned to the left hand and the other is assigned to
the right. The subject assigns stimuli to the appropriate category by typing a designated key with the
appropriate hand. For example, the category names might be “Good” and “Bad”, and a subject will
be presented with a series of words on the screen. The words might be “vomit”, “joy”, “terrible”,
or “happy”, and the subject is responsible for classifying these as either good or bad words. The
subject might perform 2 category tasks multiple times to warm up. Then, the participant is
presented with four categories: two categories assigned to the left hand, and two categories assigned
to the right hand. For example, a commonly used IAT asks respondents to pair the racial categories
“black” and “white”, with the categories “good” and “bad”. “Good” and “white” are assigned to
the left hand, and “black” and “bad” are assigned to the right for one block of stimuli. Then, the
categories are switched: good words and black faces are assigned to the right hand, while bad words
and white faces are assigned to the left. The relevant measure on the test is typically how long it
takes the respondent to categorize each stimulus: faster response times for paired concepts indicate
stronger associations between concepts. For example, in the US, respondents typically have an
easier time responding to stimuli when white is paired with good, compared to black paired with
good. (Greenwald and Banaji 1995)
Study
I hypothesize that religious language used by a politician should improve evaluations of the
politician. This improvement should be reflected with both implicit and explicit measures, although
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I expect that there are important differences between these measures: [i.e., I do not expect that both
measures capture the same underlying construct].
Subjects
Thirty three students at Wright Community College in Chicago from summer courses in
political science and sociology participated in this experiment in July 2005. The sample included 22
women and 11 men, and the majority of students were between 18 and 23 years old. Seventy-three
percent of the subjects were Democrats, while only 10% who were Republicans, though partisanship
was equally distributed among the treatment and control groups. Forty-five percent of the sample
was white, 24% were Hispanic, and 21% were Asian. This group is fairly representative of the
national population on measures of religiosity (See table 1)
Table 1: Comparison of Wright Sample with General Social Survey
Wright Community
College Sample
Religious Preference
Protestant/Catholic
70%
None
12%
Religious Service Attendance*
Once a week or more
Once/Twice a month
Once/Twice a year or never
48%
12%
39%
GSS
2002
78%
14%
40%
29%
31%
*Response options on the GSS are slightly different: I grouped nearly every week, every
week and more than once a week to form the high attending category, several times a year,
2 or 3 times a month, and once a month formed the moderate category, and never, less than
once a year, and once a year formed the infrequent attenders category.
Procedure
Subjects were asked to participate in a brief survey during class time. The survey included a
paper-based IAT (See figure 1 for a schematic representation), which has been used to adapt the
IAT to a classroom setting (Lowery et. al. 2002). Subjects are asked to categorize words and pictures
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Schematic Description of IAT Experiment
Category Lables
Step 1
Sample Stimuli
Good
Practice
block
X
Category Labels
Bad
joy
hatred
X
Step 2
Tom
Brad
Practice
block
X
Step 3
Practice
block
Tom
Good
Brad
Bad
horrible
X
X
Step 4
Experimental Manipulation: Clinton's Speech
Step 5
Measurement
block
Clinton
Good
X
Bush
Bad
joy
X
Step 6
Measurement
block
Clinton
Bad
Bush
Good
X
X
vomit
Step 7
Measurement
block
Bush
Bad
Clinton
Good
Measurement
block
Bush
Good
Clinton
Bad
Step 8
Description of the IAT used in this experiment. The correct answer for each section is indicated by a check mark.
IAT scores were calculated by adding the number of correct responses from the two Clinton/Good sections,
and the two Bush/Good sections. The correct Bush/Good score is then subtracted from the correct Clinton/Good
score, creating the overall IAT measure. Chart adapted from Brunel, et. al., 2004.
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of individuals. Rather than relying on reaction times, the paper-based IAT constrains subjects to 25
seconds per page, and captures the ease of associations through the number of correct
categorizations per page. First, subjects were presented with a page of 30 positive and negative
words, with the categories, “Good” and “Bad” at the top of the page. Subjects were given 25
seconds to categorize each word, by checking off circles that were on each side of the words. The
second page asked them to categorize pictures of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt under the categories
“Tom” and “Brad”. The third page had pictures and words, and subjects were asked to check the
left side for words that were good, or pictures of Tom, and the right side for words that were bad, or
pictures of Brad. The purpose of the actor IAT was to teach subjects how to perform an IAT
without bringing political ideas to mind. Subjects were then exposed to a picture of Bill Clinton and
an excerpt from one of his Saturday morning radio addresses, which they were asked to evaluate. In
the treatment condition, the excerpt included a biblical reference and in the control condition, it did
not:
Treatment Condition
“So to every parent I say, turn off the TV more, get to know your child’s teacher. Spend
time together, read and learn together. Above all, teach your child right from wrong. If parents do
their jobs, and the rest of us, including government do our part, America’s future will be assured,
because we work together. The Bible asks, “If your child asks for bread, would you give him a
stone? If he asks for fish, would you give him a serpent? If he asks for an egg, would you give him
a scorpion?” Our children are what we give them. We dare not forget that basic truth. Their lives
and our common future depend on it.”
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Control Condition
“So to every parent I say, turn off the TV more, get to know your child’s teacher. Spend
time together, read and learn together. Above all, teach your child right from wrong. If parents do
their jobs, and the rest of us, including government do our part, America’s future will be assured,
because we work together. Our children are what we give them. We dare not forget that basic
truth. Their lives and our common future depend on it.”
Subjects were than asked to perform a Clinton/Bush IAT, which was 4 pages long, and alternated
between pairing Clinton/Good Bush/Bad and Bush/Good Clinton/Bad. This marked the end of
the timed portion of the survey. Subjects were asked several other implicit and explicit assessments
of Clinton, followed by demographic questions and questions about their religious beliefs6 .
The experiment provides a particularly tough test of my hypothesis: by pairing a political
speech with religious imagery with a control condition, which includes a similarly positive speech,
lacking only the religious imagery, the experiment is well designed to test if there is anything special
about religious language in politics. Further, the Carpenter and Banaji study (2001) found that
priming subjects with a strong female leader strengthened associations between women and
strength, but the prime did not affect the more general positive association. In this experiment, it is
possible that the religious language will strengthen the relationship between the politician and
“religious”, but also not affect more general positive associations. Finally, this experiment attempts
to manipulate attitudes towards a very well known figure, for whom most people already have well
formed attitudes. It should be particularly difficult to move these attitudes with exposure to a brief
speech.
6
The study presented explicit measures after the Implicit Association Test, while other studies randomize the order
of implicit and explicit measures. The IAT always preceded the explicit measures in this experiment because it was
administered in a classroom setting with uniform instructions. Research indicates that order effects involving the
IAT and explicit measures are minimal (Greenwald and Farnham, 2000)
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Measures
Immediately after reading Clinton’s speech, subjects were asked for their impressions. They
were asked to offer their initial impression by placing themselves on a 5 point scale, ranging from
“very negative” to “very positive”, and were asked how important they thought the issue was,
ranging from “not at all important” to “extremely important”.
The IAT score is each subject’s number of correct categorizations of Clinton and positive
words (Bush and negative words) minus the number of correct categorizations of Bush and positive
words (Clinton and negative words). Three explicit measures of attitudes toward Bill Clinton were
collected. Subjects were asked to rate the warmth of their feelings towards Bill Clinton, by placing
an X on a scale. The scale a line, with endpoints labeled “cold” and “warm” and with a midpoint
designated “neutral”. These markings were translated into a numeric scale, which ranged from 1-79.
Subjects were also asked to asses Bill Clinton’s likeability, and whether they thought Bill Clinton was
a good president. Both questions asked respondents to place themselves on a 5 point scale.
Finally, subjects were asked to answer some basic demographic questions, followed by more
detailed questions about their religion, religious service attendance, childhood religion, how religious
their upbringing was, and their beliefs about the bible.
Results
Treatment and control groups did not differ on either their initial reactions to the speech
(4.31 vs. 4.24, p=.75) or on ratings of issue importance (4.19 vs. 4.24, p=.87). As predicted, the IAT
showed that subjects who were exposed to Clinton’s speech containing religious language had an
easier time when Clinton was paired with good, and a harder time when Clinton was compared with
bad, than those who were not. On average, subjects demonstrated a pro-Clinton bias, which is not
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surprising because all subjects were exposed to a speech by Clinton, and the group was largely
Democratic. Also, all subjects received the Good/Clinton pairing first. The mean score for the
control group was 14.1 and for the treatment group was 18.0 (p=.21). Figure 2 shows the
distribution of IAT scores for the control and treatment groups. Subjects in both groups are
arranged from the lowest score (indicating little preference for either Clinton or Bush) to the highest
score (indicating a strong preference for Clinton over Bush).
Figure 2
IAT Scores: Clinton/Good - Bush/Good Correct
40
35
30
25
20
Control Group
15
Treatment Group
10
5
0
1
3
5
7
9
11
13
15
17
-5
Figure 2 demonstrates that religious language had a consistent effect on the treatment group, and
that the difference in means was not driven by an outlier. Individuals in both groups varied in the
extent to which they preferred Clinton on the IAT, but the difference between the treatment and
control groups is fairly stable. I also use an OLS regression in order to estimate the effect of the
treatment. Controlling for party identification, age, and beliefs about the bible, religious language
has a significant effect on IAT scores at the .05 level, given a one-tailed test. (See Table 2)
19
Table 2: IAT Scores
Experimental Condition
Party Identification
Age
Beliefs about the Bible
Constant
Coef.
5.11
-1.04
-0.46
3.05
14.66
Number of observations
2
r
33
.24
SE
2.89
1.08
0.19
2.46
7.85
p>t
0.088
0.346
0.024
0.226
0.072
Source: 2005 Wright IAT Study
The explicit measures also revealed that the subjects had favorable impressions of Bill
Clinton. On the feeling thermometer, the group was fairly warm towards Clinton. On a scale that
ranged from 1 to 79, the mean score was 55.8. The manipulation seems to have affected the explicit
measure: the mean score for the control group is 53.1 and for the treatment group is 58.6 (p=.39).
Controlling for age, partisan identification and beliefs about the bible, the experimental condition
does not reach statistical significance, though this result might be due to the small sample and wide
variance in the dependant variable. There were no significant differences between the treatment and
control group on assessments of Clinton’s likeability (4.25 vs. 4.06, p=.66), or evaluations of his
presidency (3.94 vs. 3.94, p=.99).
The explicit warmth towards Clinton and the IAT scores are positively, but weakly
correlated (r=.30, p<.10) as predicted. However, the explicit measure captures simply attitudes
towards Clinton, while the IAT measures a relative preference: attitudes towards Clinton in relation
to Bush. Some of the independent variation is due to this discrepancy. 7
7
In future studies, this problem will be resolved by obtaining explicit measures for both Bill Clinton and George
Bush.
20
Analysis
The importance of implicit cognition might not seem obvious to political scientists, who are
naturally concerned with opinions such as candidate preference, at an explicit level. However,
studies of implicit cognition are a useful addition to public opinion research because they allow us to
take a step back in the study of attitude formation and change. Attitudes develop through exposure
that we are aware of, but also through the innumerable associations we pick up every day without
realizing. The importance of implicit attitudes in studies of racial attitudes has been repeatedly
demonstrated (Correll et. al. 2002, DasGupta and Greenwald 2001). This paper argues for a broader
application of our attention to implicit attitudes.
Overall, the experiment demonstrates that Bill Clinton’s use of religious rhetoric led to
attitude change. This change was seen clearly in performance on the IAT. This finding supports my
hypothesis that a politician’s use of religious references can affect political attitudes. Further, the
experiment provided evidence that the implicit and explicit measures captured distinct underlying
constructs. As Fazio and Olson (2003) argue, an effect on an implicit measure does not necessarily
demonstrate implicit cognition. However, several findings support my hypothesis that the language
was affecting attitudes at an implicit level. First, the only difference between the treatment and
control group was the inclusion of a biblical quote in an excerpt of Clinton’s speech, and
respondents in both groups had similar assessments of the speech. Also, the significant finding on
the implicit measure and the low correlation between this and the explicit measure suggests that
there was attitude change at the implicit level that was not reflected at the explicit level.
Through his use of religious language, Bill Clinton was able to make positive associations
more salient. This is because people do not have fixed “Bill Clinton” attitudes. There are many
facets to an individual, just as there are many subsets to a broad demographic category such as
“African American” or “the elderly”. Just as DisGupta and Greenwald (2001) were able to make a
21
subset of a category salient through exposing subjects to liked and disliked representatives of the
larger categories, it seems Clinton was able to put a better face forward when he referenced the
bible. It is particularly impressive that a figure as well known as Bill Clinton is able to shift attitudes
with religious language.
Attitudes towards Bill Clinton shifted because of the prominent role of religion in the lives
of many Americans, and in American public life more generally. The United States is a particularly
“churched” nation: most Americans are exposed to religion early on in their lives, and many
continually reencounter religious ideas and images as they grow up. In this context, it is not
surprising that Clinton’s use of religious language affects Americans’ attitudes beneath their level of
awareness.
Future Research
As previously noted, the interesting question regarding concordance between implicit and
explicit measures is when are they related, instead of simply if they are related. For this study, I
expect that the relationship between implicit and explicit measures varies by one’s religiosity and
belief that religion belongs in politics. However, due to the small sample, I tested for the strength of
relationships amongst the entire sample. In future research, I will also investigate whether
individuals who would rather reduce the role of religion in politics are persuaded through implicit
processes. Because of strong religious associations that are formed over a life time, religious
language might be persuasive even for those who object to religion in politics. This is analogous to
racial attitude studies that demonstrate that white Americans who are not racist by explicit measures
are affected by racialized messages at an implicit level. Also, due to the skewed nature of the sample
on partisanship, it is impossible to determine if party identification interacts with exposure to
religious language from a partisan politician. The next study will also include two more conditions:
22
Bush with and without religious language, as a test for generalizability across politicians. Finally, a
larger sample for this study will allow for a more nuanced examination of these effects amongst
people of differing levels of religiosity and different political affiliations. Currently, this project is
under consideration at Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS), and a second larger
classroom administration of the experiment is planned for early October. These opportunities
provide the large, diverse samples that are necessary for discerning these effects.
23
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