A History of Implicit Social Cognition Where Is It Coming From? Where Is It Now? Where Is It Going?

Abstract

Within the space of two decades, virtually every intellectual question in social psychology, and many outside of it, has been shaped by the theories and methods of implicit social cognition. Many of those questions are pondered in this volume, involving the role of automatic/implicit/unconscious processes in attitudes (Petty & Brinol, Chapter 18), social judgment and decision-making (Bodenhausen & Todd, Chapter 15), goal pursuit (Ferguson & Porter, Chapter 17), prejudice and stereotyping (Amodio & Mendoza, Chapter 19; Trawalter & Shapiro, Chapter 20), self-concepts and selfesteem (Schnabel & Asendorpf, Chapter 22; Zeigler-Hill & Jordan, Chapter 21), social-cognitive development (Olson & Dunham, Chapter 13), romantic relationships (Baldwin, Lydon, McClure, & Etchison, Chapter 23), and social justice (Payne & Cameron, Chapter 24). Expanding beyond the traditional boundaries of social psychology, the basic ideas of implicit social cognition have also had an impact in many applied areas, including health psychology (Wiers et al., Chapter 25), clinical psychology (Teachman, Cody, & Clerkin, Chapter 26), forensic psychology (Snowden & Gray, Chapter 27), consumer psychology (Perkins & Forehand, Chapter 28), and political psychology (Nosek, Graham, & Hawkins, Chapter 29). In every topic of study, implicit social cognition is concerned with automatic/implicit/unconscious processes underlying judgments and social behavior. An indispensable part of this endeavor is the use of a new class of indirect measurement procedures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) and different kinds of sequential priming tasks (e.g., Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005; Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 1997), which play a crucial role in the chapters of this book. Thumbing through its pages makes it clear how implicit social cognition has brought new insights, and also new controversies, wherever it has led. In fact, implicit social cognition has grown at such an incredible rate over the past years that it seems almost impossible to keep track of the rapidly progressing developments in this area. The purpose of this handbook is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of the field, including key findings, current directions, and emerging themes in the area of implicit social cognition. In this introduction, we aim to provide a context for the chapters that follow by highlighting some of the themes that keep surfacing in the field, tracing them to their historical roots, and identifying emerging themes that may guide future research. We hope that our historical synopsis will not only provide an orientation for the in-depth discussions of particular topics in the following chapters, but also circumscribe the characteristics that define implicit social cognition as a particular way of studying, understanding, and explaining human behavior. In addition, we hope that our introduction helps illuminate the historical roots of previous and ongoing debates, which seems valuable for critical appraisals of theoretical interpretations in implicit social cognition. Where Is It Coming From? A history of implicit social cognition could easily enough start with Freud and the psychoanalytic unconscious; or with Augustine and Aquinas who had a lot to say about the limits of introspection in knowing thyself; or even with Plato and Aristotle who commented extensively on consciousness and intentional behavior. Our aim in this introduction is more modest. It is to take a selective look at roughly the last two decades in which implicit social cognition has comprised a recognizable enterprise in its own right, establishing itself as one of the most influential approaches in social psychology. This process began as researchers adapted ideas and methods from cognitive psychology to answer social psychological questions. As we shall see, many of the lively debates in implicit social cognition can be traced to which particular tradition of cognitive psychology was appropriated. Two roots of implicit social cognition Papers on implicit social cognition include a lot of hyphens and slashes in their key terms. Phrases like automatic/implicit/unconscious processing and controlled/explicit/conscious processing abound. Aside from being less than precise, such phrases reveal a tension at the heart of the discipline. One theme that recurs in the field, and in this book, is an uneasy relationship between notions of automaticity and unconsciousness. When these terms are thrown together, they sometimes leave readers with only a vague idea of what is being studied. But a sharper picture emerges when we take a step back and distinguish two intellectual traditions that gave rise to separate terminologies. One

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