Implicit Social Influence

Abstract

Previous research has shown that people hold two kinds of attitudes, explicit attitudes, which are voluntary evaluations of things, and implicit attitudes, which are automatic evaluations that occur spontaneously and are difficult or impossible to control. Prior work has shown that social influence, whether it is intentional persuasion or incidental influence, usually leads the recipient of the influence to change his or her attitudes to be closer to the attitudes of the source of the influence. This work has focused on the effect of the explicit attitudes of the source of influence but ignored the possible effect of the source's implicit attitudes. Three studies examine the independent effect of the source's implicit attitude on a recipient in different social influence settings. In the first study, the implicit and explicit attitudes of a source towards a target were measured, and in the second two studies the implicit and explicit attitudes of the source were manipulated. In the first study, the recipient watched the source give a persuasive message about the target, in the second study the source described the target directly to the recipient, and in the third study, the recipient watched the source interacting with the target. Results revealed that implicit attitudes have an influence on a recipient, but in unexpected ways. In the first study, the sources' implicit attitudes led to a contrast effect on the recipients' explicit attitudes. In the second and third study the manipulation of the sources' attitudes did not work as expected, and the influence of the sources' implicit attitudes on the recipient was not detected. Thus, a person's implicit attitudes can influence another person's attitudes, but they must be strong and possibly naturally occurring. The conditions in which implicit attitudes lead to influence deserve further research.