It's time to do more research on the attitude-behavior relation: A commentary on implicit attitude measures.

Abstract

The recent exchange about implicit attitudes is an acute reminder of the need to pay research attention to the correlation between implicit attitudes and overt behavior. Current implicit measures are excellent to detect evaluatively relevant associations arising from specific and variable internal states and predict judgments when people lack the motivation and ability to control those judgments. However, there is no convincing evidence of a strong correlation between such implicit attitudes and overt behavior when people's ability and motivation to control the influence of these attitudes is low. Researchers should improve implicit measures by better integrating action, target, level, and context into the measurement procedures and then reexamine if these improved measures predict socially undesirable behaviors when ability and motivation to control behavior are low. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Theory and Methods Neuroscience > Behavior Neuroscience > Cognition.