title: Gaining control over responses to implicit attitude tests: Implementation intentions engender fast responses on attitude-incongruent trials.
abstract: The present research investigated whether forming implementation intentions could promote fast responses to attitude-incongruent associations (e.g., woman-manager) and thereby modify scores on popular implicit measures of attitude. Expt 1 used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure associations between gender and science versus liberal arts. Planning to associate women with science engendered fast responses to this category-attribute pairing and rendered summary scores more neutral compared to standard IAT instructions. Expt 2 demonstrated that forming egalitarian goal intentions is not sufficient to produce these effects. Expt 3 extended these findings to a different measure of implicit attitude (the Go/No-Go Association Task) and a different stereotypical association (Muslims-terrorism). In Expt 4, managers who planned to associate women with superordinate positions showed more neutral IAT scores relative to non-planners and effects were maintained 3 weeks later. In sum, implementation intentions enable people to gain control over implicit attitude responses.
authors.affiliation: University of Sheffield, UK. t.webb@sheffield.ac.uk
authors.forename: Thomas L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Webb
authors.forename: Paschal
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sheeran
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pepper
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D001244:Association; D001290:Attitude; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D007389:Internal-External Control; D007514:Islam / Q000523:psychology; D008297:Male; D057228:Masculinity; D011930:Reaction Time; D012380:Role; D013240:Stereotyping; D023481:Terrorism; D014936:Word Association Tests