Implicit volition and stereotype control

Abstract

Goals are mental representations that vary in accessibility and operate within goal systems. The implicit nature of goal activation and pursuit is shown here to make goals effective not merely at overturning the influence of an activated stereotype on how people respond to members of stereotyped groups, but effective at implicitly controlling the activation of stereotypes in the first place. In a set of experiments examining chronic egalitarian goals, faces and names of members of stereotyped groups presented as target stimuli led to the inhibition of stereotypes, as well as to the heightened accessibility of egalitarian goals. A separate set of experiments illustrate a similar ability of individuals to control stereotype activation when egalitarian goals are temporarily triggered within a context, rather than being chronically held. Goals that require one to inhibit stereotypic associations to a target can lead to the intended, yet implicit, control of stereotype activation, even when one is not aware the goal is active or being pursued or being regulated.

Keywords:

• Compensatory cognition
• Goal priming
• Implicit goals
• Inhibition
• Stereotyping

Notes

¹In another experiment participants were primed with words related to either a known temptation or goal. When primed with a temptation, response times on a lexical decision task were faster to words associated with the relevant (but incompatible) goal relative to an irrelevant goal. When primed with a goal, lexical decision responses to words relevant to the temptation were not faster relative to those irrelevant to the temptation. Thus, temptations (fattening foods, primed words) primed goals with which the temptation was incompatible, whereas those goals did not prime the temptation. These experiments support the goal systems hierarchical logic.

²The specific type of implicit operations triggered by a goal may depend on the opportunities that are present. For example, Fein and Spencer (1997) found that failure feedback on a test led to increased stereotyping of others. Koole, Smeets, van Knippenberg, and Dijksterhuis (1999) found that negative feedback following the same test led to different operations—ruminating on the test. Beauregard and Dunning (1998) showed that the threat to self following this failure feedback led to derogating another's intellect.

³One example is Hastie and Kumar's (1979) research in which participants are given either the goal to form impressions of others or to memorise information about others. These goals alter the way people attend to information consistent or inconsistent with a prior impression of a person, determining the manner in which such information is encoded and recalled. Hamilton, Katz, and Leirer (1980), as well as Srull (1983), provide a second example, focusing on how goals impact the manner in which information is integrated and then clustered in memory.

⁴If we grant that implementation intentions are implicitly triggered, despite having been consciously set at a prior point in time, then experiments illustrating their influence on implicit operations would fit here as well (e.g., Aarts et al., 1999; Gollwitzer, 1999).

⁵Discrepancies are also consciously detected in experimental settings such as that created in research on hypocrisy (Stone, Weigand, Cooper, & Aronson, 1997) where participants are led to choose freely to publicly advocate for a position that opposes their personal opinion/behaviour (and then have that opposition brought to mind). A third example includes settings in which a person is given explicit failure feedback, such as poor performance being recorded in a domain of importance to the individual (e.g., Gollwitzer, Wicklund, & Hilton, 1982; Koole et al., 1999; Spencer et al., 1998).

⁶It could be argued that across all of the experiments of Moskowitz and colleagues, in which people contemplate failure at an egalitarian goal, the goal was implicit. Although the goal was initially explicit (writing about a failure), it could be argued that at the time of responding the goal was implicitly accessible. Implicit goal accessibility requires either that the individual is not aware the discrepancy increased the accessibility of a goal, or that the individual is not aware that the goal is activated at the time of the compensatory response. The tasks are performed in a separate room and have no overt resemblance that would allow participants to assume the reaction time task on the computer can in any way address the goals they had previously been contemplating. Thus the initial explicit goal may have receded from consciousness at the time the implicit response was made, and the response in no way calls the goal back to mind. In either case, an explicitly triggered goal is directing implicit responding. Our focus here is on the implicit response, not on whether it is initiated by an explicit or implicit goal. Each is possible.