Implicit Political Attitudes

This chapter reviews recent work on implicit political attitudes, detailing how, when, and why unconscious processes impact the explicit expression of political beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. The authors begin by discussing thresholds of awareness, defining implicit attitudes and how the circumstances under which they reach conscious awareness. The ubiquity of unconscious effects in everyday life is considered, and two research paradigms for measuring implicit attitudes are discussed. The resulting dual-process model, in which influences can be either conscious or subconscious, allows us to understand how sensory input works its way through the mind to influence attitudes and behaviors in ways that are rarely evident to the individual. These influences often include factors that the individual would never consider as being important, but nevertheless hold enormous power over effortful decision-making.