Further Evidence for Awareness of Implicit Attitudes: Accurate Prediction of Implicit Evaluations Extends Across Different Implicit Measures and Different Prediction Tasks

Abstract

Calling into question the pervasive assumption that people lack awareness of their own implicit evaluations, a growing body of research has demonstrated that people are quite accurate when predicting how they will perform on implicit measures. However, given both the theoretical and practical implications of understanding the extent to which people are aware of the cognitions reflected on implicit measures, it is crucial to examine the generality of this finding. Across four studies using two different measures of implicit evaluations, two different prediction tasks, and multiple target categories, we replicated the key finding that people are quite accurate in predicting their performance on implicit measures. Combining these results with those from existing work strongly suggests that people’s ability to accurately predict their performance on implicit measures is not simply an artifact of the particular measure used to tap implicit evaluations or the particular way in which predictions are assessed.