People have attitudes they are aware of (explicit attitudes) but also supposidly have attitudes they don't know they have (implicit attitudes). Did you know you might love the Backstreet Boys, even though you think you hate them? This distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes has been extremely influential in Social Psychology and many other fields of social science. It has also led to the development of (mostly ineffective) implicit bias training. In this episode, Smith questions the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes. Certainly, there are different ways of measuring attitudes, but it is unclear if these different measures tap into separate constructs or are simply different ways of measuring the same construct.

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Marginally Significant is hosted by:

Andrew Smith @andrewrsmith

Twila Wingrove @twilawingrove

Andrew Monroe @monroeandrew

Chris Holden @profcjholden

You can contact Marginally Significant on Twitter (@marginallysig), through email (marginallysig@gmail.com), or on the web (marginallysignificant.fireside.fm/contact).

Links:

• Psychology’s Racism-Measuring Tool Isn’t Up to the Job -- Science of Us
• Psychology’s favourite tool for measuring implicit bias is still mired in controversy – Research Digest
• The Implicit Association Test at Age 21: No Evidence for Construct Validity | Replicability-Index — "Most important, I show that few studies were able to test discriminant validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit personality characteristics and that a single-construct model fits multi-method data as well or better than a dual-construct models.  Thus, the IAT appears to be a measure of the same personality characteristics that are measured with explicit measures."