Awareness of Implicit Attitudes Revisited: A Meta-Analysis on Replications Across Samples and Settings

Alexandra Goedderz, Zahra Rahmani Azad, Adam Hahn

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

A long-standing debate in social psychology is whether the cognitions reflected on implicit measures are unconscious. Research by Hahn et al. (2014) has documented that people are able to predict the patterns of their results on Implicit Association Tests (IATs) towards five pairs of social groups prospectively. The present article presents a meta-analysis of 17 published and unpublished exact replication studies conducted by or in close supervision of the original author. Replicating Hahn et al., participants in all 17 studies were able to accurately predict the patterns of their IAT results (meta-analytical within-subject effect size: b = .44; corrected average within-subjects correlation r = .56). This prediction accuracy effect was smaller for online (b = .27; corrected r = .37) than lab (b = .47; corrected r = .61) studies, as well as for general-public (b = .27; corrected r = .36) as opposed to student samples (b = .47; corrected r = .60). Moreover, predictions fully explained implicit-explicit relations, and they seemed to reflect unique insights into participants’ own cognitions beyond mere knowledge about normatively expected patterns of implicit responses. This pattern of results remained the same across samples, settings, countries (Canada, US, and Germany), and languages (English vs. German). Further analyses suggested that lower prediction accuracy in online samples seems to partly reflect a suppression effect from higher consistency between traditional explicit evaluations and predictions. Controlling for explicit evaluations (which exerted a negative unique effect on IAT scores beyond IAT score predictions) reduced the difference between online and lab studies substantially. Together, the results strengthen the hypothesis that the cognitions reflected on implicit evaluations are largely accessible to conscious awareness.

Original languageEnglish
Article number126220
JournalCollabra: Psychology
Volume10
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Dec 2024

Data Availability Statement

Open Data Repository with all data, scripts, preregistrations and materials: https://osf.io/mejzp/

A preprint of this article has been published at https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/frwcy

Funding

The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft, DFG) awarded to Author 3 (HA 8167/2-1 “Self-Insight into Attitudes: Distinguishing Introspective from Social Self-Awareness in Research on Implicit Evaluations”).

Keywords

  • attitudes
  • awareness
  • consciousness
  • implicit bias
  • introspection
  • meta-analysis
  • racial bias

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Psychology

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