Who Owns Implicit Attitudes? Testing a Metacognitive Perspective

Abstract

Metacognitive inferences about ownership for one’s implicit attitudes have the power to turn implicit bias into explicit prejudice. In Study 1, participants were assigned to construe their implicit attitudes toward gay men as belonging to themselves (owned) or as unrelated to the self (disowned). Construing one’s implicit responses as owned led to greater implicit-explicit attitude correspondence. In Study 2, we measured ownership for implicit attitudes as well as self-esteem. We predicted that ownership inferences would dictate explicit attitudes to the degree that people had positive views of the self. Indeed, higher ownership for implicit bias was associated with greater implicit-explicit attitude correspondence, and this effect was driven by participants high in self-esteem. Finally, in Study 3, we manipulated inferences of ownership and measured self-esteem. Metacognitions of ownership affected implicit-explicit attitude correspondence but only among those with relatively high self-esteem. We conclude that subjective inferences about implicit bias affect explicit prejudice.