Implicit and explicit illusory correlation as a function of political ideology

Research has demonstrated that people who embrace different ideological orientations often show differences at the level of basic cognitive processes. For instance, conservatives (vs. liberals) display an automatic selective attention for negative (vs. positive) stimuli, and tend to more easily form...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014-05, Vol.9 (5), p.e96312-e96312
Main Authors: Carraro, Luciana, Negri, Paolo, Castelli, Luigi, Pastore, Massimiliano
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Attention
Attitude
Attitudes
Behavior
Biology and Life Sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive ability
Conservatism
Correlation
Female
Humans
Ideology
Liberalism
Male
Medicine and Health Sciences
Minority & ethnic groups
Minority groups
Political ideologies
Politics
Social Perception
Social Sciences
Socialization
Stereotyping
Young Adult
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Summary:Research has demonstrated that people who embrace different ideological orientations often show differences at the level of basic cognitive processes. For instance, conservatives (vs. liberals) display an automatic selective attention for negative (vs. positive) stimuli, and tend to more easily form illusory correlations between negative information and minority groups. In the present work, we further explored this latter effect by examining whether it only involves the formation of explicit attitudes or it extends to implicit attitudes. To this end, following the typical illusory correlation paradigm, participants were presented with members of two numerically different groups (majority and minority) each performing either a positive or negative behaviour. Negative behaviors were relatively infrequent, and the proportion of positive and negative behaviors within each group was the same. Next, explicit and implicit (i.e., IAT-measured) attitudes were assessed. Results showed that conservatives (vs. liberals) displayed stronger explicit as well as implicit illusory correlations effects, forming more negative attitudes toward the minority (vs. majority) group at both the explicit and implicit level.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0096312