Implicit attitude

Article summary

Implicit attitudes are evaluations that occur without conscious awareness towards an attitude object or the self. These evaluations are generally either favorable or unfavorable and come about from various influences in the individual experience. The commonly used definition of implicit attitude within cognitive and social psychology comes from Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji's template for definitions of terms related to implicit cognition: "Implicit attitudes are introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects". These thoughts, feelings or actions have an influence on behavior that the individual may not be aware of. An attitude is differentiated from the concept of a stereotype in that it functions as a broad favorable or unfavorable characteristic towards a social object, whereas a stereotype is a set of favorable and/or unfavorable characteristics which are applied to an individual based on social group membership. The following article will first discuss the potential causes and manifestations of implicit attitudes, specifically about social and cognitive aspects. It will then include the influence of awareness, as well as the debate on implicit attitude change.…

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1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
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3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

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