Carlee Beth Hawkins

Implicit social cognition: From measures to mechanisms

Most human cognition occurs outside conscious awareness or conscious control. Some of these implicit processes influence social perception, judgment and action. The past 15 years of research in implicit social cognition can be characterized as the Age of Measurement because of a proliferation of measurement methods and research evidence demonstrating their practical value for predicting human behavior. Implicit measures assess constructs that are distinct, but related, to self-report assessments, and predict variation in behavior that is not accounted for by those explicit measures. The present state of knowledge provides a foundation for the next age of implicit social cognition: clarification of the mechanisms underlying implicit measurement and how the measured constructs influence behavior.

Cumulative and Career-Stage Citation Impact of Social-Personality Psychology Programs and Their Members

Number of citations and the h-index are popular metrics for indexing scientific impact. These, and other existing metrics, are strongly related to scientists’ seniority. This article introduces complementary indicators that are unrelated to the number of years since PhD. To illustrate cumulative and career-stage approaches for assessing the scientific impact across a discipline, citations for 611 scientists from 97 U.S. and Canadian social psychology programs are amassed and analyzed. Results provide benchmarks for evaluating impact across the career span in psychology and other disciplines with similar citation patterns. Career-stage indicators provide a very different perspective on individual and program impact than cumulative impact, and may predict emerging scientists and programs. Comparing social groups, Whites and men had higher impact than non-Whites and women, respectively. However, average differences in career stage accounted for most of the difference for both groups.

Motivated Independence? Implicit Party Identity Predicts Political Judgments Among Self-Proclaimed Independents

Reporting an Independent political identity does not guarantee the absence of partisanship. Independents demonstrated considerable variability in relative identification with Republicans versus Democrats as measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT; M = 0.10, SD = 0.47). To test whether this variation predicted political judgment, participants read a newspaper article describing two competing welfare (Study 1) or special education (Study 2) policies. The authors manipulated which policy was proposed by which party. Among self-proclaimed Independents, those who were implicitly Democratic preferred the liberal welfare plan, and those who were implicitly Republican preferred the conservative welfare plan. Regardless of the policy details, these implicit partisans preferred the policy proposed by “their” party, and this effect occurred more strongly for implicit than explicit plan preference. The authors suggest that implicitly partisan Independents may consciously override some partisan influence when making explicit political judgments, and Independents may identify as such to appear objective even when they are not.

In Search of an Association Between Conception Risk and Prejudice

Recent theory and evidence suggest that physiological processes, such as women’s menstrual cycles, influence psychological processes. For example, Navarrete, Fessler, Fleischman, and Geyer (2009) demonstrated that women with higher levels of conception risk (higher likelihood of becoming pregnant given the day in their menstrual cycle) exhibited stronger racial biases favoring White men over Black men on a variety of measures. McDonald, Asher, Kerr, and Navarrete (2011) found that the link between conception risk and racial bias (controlling for participants’ race) was more pronounced among women who held stronger implicit stereotypes associating Black men with “physical” and White men with “mental.” These effects reflect the presumed safety of in-group compared with out-group members, and thus the higher perceived threat of unwanted conception by women when they are in the fertile phase of their cycle. Intrigued by this evidence, we sought to examine the boundary conditions for the link between intergroup bias and conception risk. Is the effect limited to racial and ethnic out-groups, or might it extend to groups defined by age, weight, religion, national citizenship, or other distinctions? The answer to this question would have important implications for theoretical refinement. In Study 1, as a first step, we aimed to replicate the original correlation between conception risk and racial bias with a high-powered design, closely following the published materials, procedure, and analysis strategy of the previous research. We failed to replicate the original effect. Thus, we revised our research objective from replication and extension to replication only of both the link between conception risk and racial bias (Studies 2–4) and the moderation of that relationship by implicit physicality stereotypes (Studies 3 and 4). In all four studies (total N = 2,226), we found no evidence for an association between conception risk and racial bias. Method

When Ingroups Aren’t 'In': Perceived Political Belief Similarity Moderates Religious Ingroup Favoritism

Motivated thinking leads people to perceive similarity between the self and ingroups, but under some conditions, people may recognize that personal beliefs are misaligned with the beliefs of ingroups. In two focal experiments and two replications, we find evidence that perceived belief similarity moderates ingroup favoritism. As part of a charity donation task, participants donated money to a community charity or a religious charity. Compared to non-religious people, Christians favored religious charities, but within Christians, conservative Christians favored religious charities more than liberal Christians did. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the perceived political beliefs of the charity accounted for the differences in ingroup favoritism between liberal and conservative Christians. While reporting little awareness of the influence of ideology, Christian conservatives favored religious charities because they perceived them as conservative and liberal Christians favored the community charity because they perceived it as liberal.

Trying But Failing: Implicit Attitude Transfer Is Not Eliminated by Overt or Subtle Objectivity Manipulations

Attitude transfer is the phenomenon whereby attitudes toward group members generalize automatically to new individuals in the same group. Although robust at the implicit level, people consciously adjust this guilt-by-association thinking when reporting explicit attitudes (Ranganath & Nosek, 2008). We tested whether people could control implicit attitude transfer if given proper motivation and instruction. We attempted to induce intentional control over attitude transfer using a variety of established methods, but in 8 studies, implicit attitudes formed and transferred to new group members. We conclude that implicit attitude transfer is a robust automatic phenomenon that is not disrupted by intentional control.