ABSTRACTExperiential purchases (focused on doing rather than having) provide more satisfaction than material goods. Here, we examine a different downstream consequence of spending money on experiences: fostering social connection. Consumers reported feeling more kinship with someone who had made a similar experiential purchase than someone who had made a similar material purchase—a result tied to the greater centrality of experiences to one's identity. This greater sense of connection that experiences provide applied even when someone else had made a similar, but superior purchase. Participants also reported feeling more connected to others in general, not just those who have made the same purchase, when reflecting on experiential consumption—and these feelings of connection were expressed in a greater desire to engage in social activities when participants considered their experiential purchases than when they considered their material purchases. Together, these results demonstrate that experiential consumption enhances people's social connection quite broadly.

Cognitive jurisprudence research that has used indirect measures has mostly focused on how people’s implicit biases (e.g., race) predict people’s verdicts for an individual belonging to an out-group. We aim to expand on this work by investigating implicit evaluations’ predictive strength for verdicts using an impression formation approach. In three preregistered studies, we presented mock jurors with a fictional murder trial in which the evidence against a defendant was mixed: some witnesses provided testimony suggesting guilt, whereas others sowed doubt. In all studies, implicit evaluations of the defendant, operationalized by the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) scores, uniquely predicted verdicts above and beyond explicit evaluations (Studies 1–3), the reason for evidence exclusion (Study 2), and demographics of the defendant (Study 3). These findings advance our understanding of implicit social cognition by demonstrating that implicit evaluations, operationalized by the AMP scores, can have predictive power in complex, ecologically rich contexts.

Recent work has shown that people can update their implicit evaluations based on facial trustworthiness. However, do these updated implicit evaluations map onto subsequent decisions? We examined whether implicit evaluations based on faces but updated in light of new behavioral evidence uniquely predict responses in the trust game. Across six studies (N = 2,059), we measured participants' initial implicit evaluations of a target based on the target's face and then their updated implicit evaluations based on newly learned behavioral evidence. We then tested whether these updated implicit evaluations uniquely predicted (i.e., beyond explicit evaluations) responses in a hypothetical trust game. Although participants consistently based their initial evaluations on the face and updated their evaluations after learning new diagnostic information, their updated implicit evaluations did not uniquely predict their responses in the trust game. We discuss theoretical considerations in this article.

Research on impressions of creative people has focused on explicit assessments of others with little emphasis on implicit person perception. We integrate growing research on creativity evaluation with the literature on implicit cognition to show, across four studies, that a short narrative about the creativity of a person can produce implicit impressions of that person as creative (Study 1). We demonstrate that such impressions of creative people are distinct from implicit positivity (Study 2). We then show that implicit impressions of creative people can uniquely predict behavioral intentions toward the person described, beyond the effects of explicit judgments (Study 3), and can provide a unique impression of a creative person in embarrassing or stigmatized domains, such as the evaluation of an inventor who created a new sex toy (Study 4). We discuss the implications of our results for research on judgments of creative people, especially those that might occur in embarrassing, stigmatized, or controversial domains.

Implicit evaluations can be malleable via reinterpretation of previously encountered evidence. Here, we report three studies (N = 1,007) investigating the robustness of this updating modality using ecologically realistic materials. Participants were first introduced to a target who killed an endangered black rhino in Namibia. They then listened to a real podcast providing counterattitudinal information on the benefits of trophy hunting. The podcast resulted in considerable revisions of initially negative implicit evaluations toward positivity, consistently across implicit measures (affect misattribution procedures vs. implicit association test), samples (American students vs. nonstudents from various countries), study settings (lab vs. online), and the presence versus absence of a memory retrieval manipulation prompting reflection on participants’ views on trophy hunting. Taken together, these findings suggest that reinterpretation can shift implicit evaluations of even highly negative targets, including under conditions of external validity.

Stereotypes are associations between social groups and semantic attributes that are widely shared within societies. The spoken and written language of a society affords a unique way to measure the magnitude and prevalence of these widely shared collective representations. Here, we used word embeddings to systematically quantify gender stereotypes in language corpora that are unprecedented in size (65+ million words) and scope (child and adult conversations, books, movies, TV). Across corpora, gender stereotypes emerged consistently and robustly for both theoretically selected stereotypes (e.g., work-home) and comprehensive lists of more than 600 personality traits and more than 300 occupations. Despite underlying differences across language corpora (e.g., time periods, formats, age groups), results revealed the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes in every corpus. Using gender stereotypes as the focal issue, we unite 19th-century theories of collective representations and 21st-century evidence on implicit social cognition to understand the subtle yet persistent presence of collective representations in language.

Explicit evaluations of racial out-groups often involve conflict between opposing evaluative tendencies. Yet this type of conflict is difficult to capture with standard measures of evaluative processing, which either ignore explicit evaluation or capture only the aspects of explicit evaluation that are consciously accessible and freely reported. A new tool may fill this gap in our ability to measure conflict in racial evaluation. This tool, called the mouse-tracking measure of racial bias (Race-MT), is designed to capture conflict in explicit evaluations of racial groups, even if that conflict is neither consciously accessible nor freely reported. We vetted the Race-MT by exploring whether it predicts discriminatory behavior. Across five studies (four preregistered, N = 1,492), we used the Race-MT to measure conflict in people's positive, explicit evaluations of racial out-groups versus in-groups. These measures predicted discriminatory behavior in a noisy, naturalistic setting, suggesting that the Race-MT provides theoretically meaningful and predicatively useful insights into racial evaluation.

Implicit evaluations (attitudes) are often described as resistant to change, especially when they were initially formed in a seemingly associative manner, such as via repeated evaluative pairings (REP), and new learning is created via propositional material, such as evaluative statements (ES). The present research (total N = 2124) tested the responsiveness of implicit evaluations instantiated via REP to updating via different types of ES. In Experiment 1, initial learning was created via repeatedly pairing a novel target with strongly negative stimuli (screams) in an aversive REP (A-REP) task. Subsequent ES of opposing valence providing diagnostic information about the target’s behavior substantially updated implicit (IAT) evaluations. In Experiment 2, behavioral ES resulted in successful updating after A-REP whether or not they provided an explanation for the initial A-REP learning. A previously unobtained result emerged in Experiment 3 showing that updating was durable even after 1 day. Finally, in Experiment 4, implicit evaluations were updated via diagnostic behavioral ES, but not via an ES instruction to suppose that different pairings had occurred during A-REP. Taken together, these experiments challenge associative theories of implicit evaluation by demonstrating that diagnostic behavioral statements can durably override the effects of initial learning on implicit evaluations, even if such initial learning is aversive and involves direct experience with stimulus pairings. Moreover, by showing that verbal manipulations based on diagnostic behavior but not a mere supposition instruction had impact, the present project advances theory by starting to identify the nature of learning that can adaptively update social impressions.

People quickly infer trustworthiness from faces and use it to guide judgments and behaviors. Past research has suggested that face information is too powerful to be overridden by behavioral evidence, especially implicitly, suggesting that untrustworthiness in faces might be an insurmountable influence in impressions of others. In 5 studies, however, we found that implicit impressions of untrustworthy faces can be effectively updated by learning new, counterattitudinal behavioral information under certain conditions. We showed that face-based implicit impressions were rapidly updated regardless of the degree of untrustworthiness in the face (Study 1), but only when new, propositional information was extreme and diagnostic (Study 2). Successful updating of untrustworthy faces occurred even under low cognitive capacity (Studies 3A and 3B), suggesting efficient processing of inconsistent information. In addition, expanding the conditions under which updating can emerge, we also found that face-based implicit impressions of trustworthiness can be updated using valenced information (positive, negative) rather than just trustworthy-specific counterevidence (Study 4). We discuss the implications of these findings for whether facial cues of untrustworthiness are surmountable in person perception, how people learn about the trustworthiness of others, and the updating of implicit impressions more generally.

Recent work has shown that implicit first impressions of other people can be rapidly updated when new information about them is highly diagnostic or provides a reinterpretation of the basis of prior belief. The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005) is one prominent implicit measure that has been widely used in this and other work. However, the status of the AMP as a measure of unintentional responding has been a matter of debate, which necessarily also raises questions about the "implicitness" of the updated responses within recent person impression research. In re-analyses of published work, we identify multimodal distributions of AMP responses that raise concerns about potential intentional influences on this task. Drawing on 8 new studies, however, we find that such patterns are not likely attributable to intentional responding (Studies 1, 2A-2B), and that methodological modifications to the AMP procedure eliminate bimodality but do not eliminate effects of rapid revision (Studies 3A-6). Furthermore, these modifications provide evidence that the rapid-revision effects reported in earlier work can be produced under suboptimal conditions such as distraction and increased vigilance against prime influence. We advocate for the continued use of judgmental misattribution as a valuable tool in the arsenal of implicit social cognition researchers, but also encourage researchers to continue to examine the distributional patterns of measures like the AMP, and what those patterns might reflect.

Human perceivers continually react to the social world implicitly-that is, spontaneously and rapidly. Earlier research suggested that implicit impressions of other people are slower to change than self-reported impressions in the face of contradictory evidence, often leaving them miscalibrated from what one learns to be true. Recent work, however, has identified conditions under which implicit impressions can be rapidly updated. Here, we review three lines of work showing that implicit impressions are responsive to information that is highly diagnostic, believable, or reframes earlier experience. These findings complement ongoing research on mechanisms of changing implicit impressions in a wider variety of groups, from real people to robots, and provide support for theoretical frameworks that embrace greater unity in the factors that can impact implicit and explicit social cognition.

Intergroup attitudes (evaluations) are generalized valence attributions to social groups (e.g., white-bad/Asian-good), whereas intergroup beliefs (stereotypes) are specific trait attributions to social groups (e.g., white-dumb/Asian-smart). When explicit (self-report) measures are used, attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social group are often related to each other but can also be dissociated. The present work used three approaches (correlational, experimental, and archival) to conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between implicit (indirectly revealed) intergroup attitudes and beliefs. In study 1 (n = 1,942), we found significant correlations and, in some cases, evidence for redundancy, between Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social groups (mean r = 0.31, 95% confidence interval: [0.24; 0.39]). In study 2 (n = 383), manipulating attitudes via evaluative conditioning produced parallel changes in belief IATs, demonstrating that implicit attitudes can causally drive implicit beliefs when information about the specific semantic trait is absent. In study 3, we used word embeddings derived from a large corpus of online text to show that the relative distance of 22 social groups from positive vs. negative words (reflecting generalized attitudes) was highly correlated with their distance from warm vs. cold, and even competent vs. incompetent, words (reflecting specific beliefs). Overall, these studies provide convergent evidence for tight connections between implicit attitudes and beliefs, suggesting that the dissociations observed using explicit measures may arise uniquely from deliberate judgment processes.

Research on impressions of creativity has focused on explicit assessments. We depart from that focus to show for the first time that people form impactful implicit impressions of another person’s creativity. In three studies, we find evidence that a short narrative about the creative products of a newly encountered person can produce implicit impressions of that person as creative (Study 1), demonstrate that such impressions are distinct from implicit positivity, such that an implicitly creative person can simultaneously be implicitly disliked (Study 2), and show that implicit creativity impressions can uniquely predict behavioral intentions toward the person beyond the effects of explicit judgments of creativity (Study 3). Our results indicate the utility of examining creativity impressions at an implicit level, and build on findings of the fast formation of other forms of implicit impressions, showing that multifaceted and predictively meaningful implicit impressions of a new person can rapidly arise.

Given the importance of setting accurate expectations of robot capabilities in humans, we explore how people form implicit judgments toward a robot over a prolonged interaction. In our study, we created a live interaction between a robot deli cashier and a human customer. The robot displays a competent behavior followed by another competent behavior (Condition A), an incompetent behavior (Condition B), or an incompetent behavior with a warning (Condition C). We measured implicit judgments of competence toward the robot using an affect misattribution procedure over time and by condition. Contrary to what many studies on implicit updating predict, results show that participants updated implicit impressions of competence over time with minimal pieces of information. However, we found no significant effect of warnings on guarding against a drop in competence judgments.

How easily can our first impressions of others be updated when we learn new, contradictory evidence? We review recent work in the social cognition literature on the ways in which implicit evaluations can be updated in a durable and robust manner. These findings show that implicit evaluations of novel individuals can be revised when the new information is believable and diagnostic, and if it reinterprets the evaluative meaning of the original information. We discuss implications of this evidence for the degree to which evaluative memories can be updated, as well as new directions for theories of human evaluation and implicit cognition.

People are adept at forming impressions of others, but how easily can impressions be updated? Although implicit first impressions have been characterized as difficult to overturn, recent work shows that they can be reversed through reinterpretation of earlier learning. However, such reversal has been demonstrated only in the same experimental session in which the impression formed, suggesting that implicit updating might be possible only within a brief temporal window, before impressions are consolidated and when memory about the initial information is strongest. Implicit impressions may be unable to be revised when reinterpreting details are learned later, due to memory consolidation or forgetting of the details to be reinterpreted. This study tested whether implicit first impressions can be reversed through reinterpretation after a two-day delay following the initial formation. Results showed that implicit revision emerged after the delay, even among those with poor explicit recall or who were not cued to recall. We discuss implications for theory on impression formation and updating.