The relationship between implicit attitudes and behavior

Under what conditions do our attitudes predict behavior? This question has received a great deal of attention during the past 75 years. However, the attention devoted to the question has focused almost exclusively on explicit (i.e., direct, self-report) measures of attitudes. Although implicit (i.e., indirect) measures have been in existence almost as long as explicit measures, relatively little research has examined the relationship between implicit attitudes and behavior. There are a number of reasons for the discrepancy in amount of research available on explicit attitude-behavior relations and implicit attitude-behavior relations, including the nearly complete disappearance of implicit attitude measures during the 1970s and 1980s. In the past ten years implicit attitude measures have made a remarkable comeback-indeed, in November 2001 an entire section of social psychology’s flagship journal was devoted to implicit attitude measures.