Changing Deep-Rooted Implicit Evaluation in the Blink of an Eye: Negative Verbal Information Shifts Automatic Liking of Gandhi

Abstract

It is often assumed that, once established, spontaneous or implicit evaluations are resistant to immediate change. Recent research contradicts this theoretical stance, showing that a person’s implicit evaluations of an attitude object can be changed rapidly in the face of new counterattitudinal information. Importantly, it remains unknown whether such changes can also occur for deep-rooted implicit evaluations of well-known attitude objects. We address this question by examining whether the acquisition of negative information changes implicit evaluations of a well-known positive historic figure: Mahatma Gandhi. We report three experiments showing rapid changes in implicit evaluations of Gandhi as measured with an affect misattribution procedure and evaluative priming task but not with an implicit association test (IAT). These findings suggest that implicit evaluations based on deep-rooted representations are subjective to rapid changes in the face of expectancy-violating information while pointing to limitations of the IAT for assessing such changes.