Of Two Minds: Forming and Changing Valence Inconsistent Implicit and Explicit attitudes

Because different processes underlie implicit and explicit attitudes, we proposed that they would be differentially sensitive to different kinds of information. Implicit and explicit attitudes were measured over time as different types of attitude-relevant information were presented about an individual attitude object. As expected, explicit attitudes formed and changed in response to the valence of consciously accessible, verbally presented behavioral information about the target. In contrast, implicit attitudes formed and changed in response to the valence of subliminally presented primes, reflecting the progressive accretion of evaluation-attitude object pairings. As a consequence, when subliminal primes and behavioral information were of opposite valence, people formed implicit and explicit attitudes of conflicting valence even though they were exposed to the same information.