Anthony Greenwald - US grants

persuasion; communication behavior; sensory thresholds; judgment; audiotape; awareness; attitude; mass information media;

ABSTRACTS This research will investigate implicit sterotypes and attitudes. These evaluations are predicted to occur when critical attributes of a social stimulus that control judgment (e.g., stimatizing attibutes such as gender, race, SES) are not at the respondent's focus of attention. In Part 1, a procedure will be used in which the attribute of fame is incorrectly assigned as a result of a bias in memory caused by perceptual familiarity. This procedure is used to identify that equal familiarity with male and female names results in a higher probability of assigning false fame to male than female names. Variations of this procedure will be used to identify the unconscious nature and limiting conditions of this bias, Part 2 will establish the generality of this phenononmenon to another social category, by using names that vary in perceived race and ethnicity, and judgments such as criminal and politician. Part 3 will present a method to study implicit attitudes, and attempts to conceptually differentiate the (cognitive) stereotype construct from the (affective) attitude construct. This research is designed to examine whether discrimination can be controlled by implicit stereotypes even in the presence of positive implicit attitudes. Together, the 3-part program of research seeks to demonstrate the value of implicit measures of stereotyping and prejudice, to provide understanding of the subtle yet powerful information processing mechanisms by which biases in evaluation are produced, and to question the currently dominant conception that such evaluations operate primarily within consciousness.

The proposed research investigates effects of stimuli presented under conditions popularly identified as "subliminal." A major component of the completed research examined effects of subliminal self-help (SSH) audiotapes (of a type now marketed extensively) that are claimed to improve self-esteem and memory. This research demonstrated (in three double-blind field experiments) that SSH tapes have no effects of actual (subliminal) content, but do have label (placebo or expectancy) effects that are of at least short-term duration. The proposed research focuses on the visual subliminal domain, in which the project has established replicable, but as yet inadequately theoretically explained, subliminal semantic activation (SSA) effects. The proposed research uses methods developed in the completed work, with the aims of establishing theoretical interpretation, and adding to the body of empirical SSA data that can be used to evaluate the potential for visual media to produce socially significant subliminal influence effects.

This grant builds on the PIs' previous finding of implicit gender stereotyping, whereby an apparantly unconscious process of incorrectly assigning fame to familiarized male names generalizes only weakly to familiarized female names. The major goal of the renewal period is to develop efficient individual- difference measures of implicit attitudes and stereotypes. This effort will build on findings from the initial project period that, together with recent findings from other laboratories, suggest that judgment- latency methods are most likely to prove successful for this purpose. The statistical technique of confirmatory factor analysis will be used to examine sensitivity, reliability, and validity of the newly developed measures. Efficient theory-based measures of implicit traits should be of great value not only to future research on this project, but also to many other researchers and, ultimately, in applied settings. The research is designed to contribute to the goals of NSF's Human Capital Initiative, specifically in the social context of disadvantage. Consistent with these goal s, a program of research examines basic processes involved in categorizing people into groups and in the stereotyping associated with those social categories. By elucidating the role of implicit stereotyping in sustaining discrimination and by developing and validating measures of implicit stereotyping and prejudice, the proposed research will contribute basic tools that will be useful in applied research aimed at overcoming discrimination and disadvantage

In ongoing research concerning implicit social cognition we have developed the view that important components of the cognitive processes that underlie social actions are (a) ordinarily hidden from the actor's awareness or ability to control and, as a consequence, (b) beyond the possibility of effective investigation using methods that are limited to self-report measures. Our research has successfully employed several indirect measures to reveal the operation of implicit stereotypes. The first goal of this project is to extend these investigations of implicit social cognition to the domains of the social-cognitive constructs of implicit attitudes and implicit self-esteem. Existing measures of unconscious social cognition (most prominently semantic priming measures) have some notable limitations. Although these measures have been used effectively at laboratories in which they were developed, they (a) have not readily been exported to other laboratories and (b) have not yielded large enough effect sizes to succeed as individual difference measures. Our previous NSF-funded research has yielded a new procedure (the Implicit Association Test, IAT) that has been shown to provide a reliable, efficient, and sensitive measure of individual differences in implicit social cognition. The second goal of the current project is to document the basic properties of the IAT method and to develop its use as a core technique for investigating implicit social cognition. The research will yield three types of desirable products: (a) new measures that should be broadly useful in psychological investigations of social behavior, (b) new theoretical insights into the involvement of unconscious cognition in social behavior, and (c)applications in important settings, such as workplace and school, in which unrecognized (i.e., implicit) stereotypes and prejudices interfere with desirable or productive behavior.

DESCRIPTION (Applicant's Abstract): This research examines the capabilities and limitations of cognition initiated by visual 'subliminal' stimuli. These are visual stimuli presented so as to evade conscious attention. The proposed research gives special attention to types of subliminal presentations that are now easily achievable in the mass media of TV and film. Since the mid-1950s, broad and generally unsubstantiated claims of effective therapeutic or other influence by visual subliminal stimuli have appeared in popular press, entertainment media, and marketplace. Until the mid-1980s, scientific evaluation of those claims was severely restricted by scientists' studied avoidance of the topic because of its air of disreputability, and by unavailability of research methods that could decisively evaluate claims. Previous work on this project has contributed to overcoming both of these constraints. The proposed research carries forward these gains by (a) testing for possible cumulative effects of several types of repeated subliminal visual presentations, (b) applying methods developed in the project's previous studies of subliminal text stimuli to test for effects of subliminal graphic/pictorial stimuli, (c) locating the currently elusive upper bound of analytic capability of cognition in response to subliminal stimuli, (d) extending the project's methods for appraising the time course of cognitive processing of subliminal stimuli to supraliminal stimuli, (e) seeking to reconcile competing published claims concerning temporal persistence of effects of subliminal visual stimuli, and (f) developing a diagnostic procedure that can provide comparative appraisal of theorized attitude conditioning procedures.

DESCRIPTION (Applicant's Abstract): This Research Career Award will facilitate the PI's (a) work on development of theory and research method for the investigation implicit and unconscious cognition (b) active collaboration with colleagues at other institutions, and (c) training of future scientists. The PI has had continuous research support since 1966 from National Science Foundation and/or national Institute of Mental health, and is presently PI on two projects (one supported by NIMH since 1988; the other by NSF since 1992) that have produced important new results in the past few years. One project has been using responses to visual "subliminal" stimuli in order to elucidate the capabilities and limits of unconscious cognition triggered by current stimuli. Recent findings in this project provided methods for replicably producing and detecting influences of stimuli that remain undetected by subjects. This method not only permits investigations of the potential for unwanted subliminal influence in mass media, but has provided a valuable tool that will be used to evaluate theories of unconscious cognitive capabilities that participate in language and perceptual processing. The second project investigates individual differences in attitudes, stereotypes, and self-esteem that operate outside of conscious awareness (implicitly). Recent findings in this project have provided a new method (the Implicit Association Test) that has greatly facilitated laboratory research on these implicit processes, and also provides a measurement procedure that has multiple potential applications because of the indications that it successfully circumvents the self-presentation or impression-management processes that heavily influence responses to most traditional measures of attitudes, stereotypes, and self-esteem. The PI has a past record of training students who currently hold tenured academic positions in which they are pursuing their own research programs. This award will release the PI from responsibilities that compete with the opportunity to mentor Ph.D. trainees.