In this chapter, I have elaborated on how attitudes are construed on what I take to be the predominant account of attitudes in the psychological and philosophical literature (the standard view), and on how these attitudes are measured. According to the standard view, people possess implicit and explicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes are usually identified with associative mental states, while explicit attitude are commonly identified with propositional mental states (section 1.2.1). Due to the identification of attitudes with individual mental states, the standard view implies that people can possess multiple implicit and explicit attitudes (section 1.2.2). I pointed out that this view is at odds with the folk psychological conception of attitudes and thus out of line with desideratum D3 of a model of attitudes.
The alleged associative structure of implicit attitudes is generally understood to imply that implicit attitudes are reason-insensitive (section 1.2.3). According to this assumption, the acquisition and change of implicit attitudes is not a function of what the subject acknowledges to be good reasons for their acquisition and change but rather of mere regularities in that subject’s environment (i.e., implicit attitudes are not subject to rational control). By contrast, explicit attitudes are assumed to be reason-responsive (i.e., subject to rational control) due to their propositional structure. That is, explicit attitudes can be acquired and changed in accordance with what the subject deems to be good reasons for such an acquisition or change. Other proponents of the standard view base the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes on a difference between automaticity and control (i.e., a difference in intentional control; section 1.2.4).
According to this, implicit attitudes can be activated and influence behaviour without the subject’s intent and without requiring attentional resources (i.e., automatically), whereas the retrieval of explicit attitudes and their influence on behaviour is intentional and requires the subject’s attention. Yet other scholars have referred to awareness as a criterion to distinguish between implicit and explicit attitudes (section 1.2.5). However, I showed that recent empirical evidence indicates that people can become aware of those mental states that are usually described as implicit attitudes (i.e., those mental states that are accessed on indirect measures of attitudes) and that how they become aware of these mental states is not necessarily any different to how they become aware of their so-called explicit attitudes. If one wants to defend the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes, awareness thus does not seem to be the right criterion.
Tying the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes to the criteria of mental
49 structure, rational control, and/or intentional control, by contrast, seems more promising.
A model of attitudes that distinguishes between explicit and implicit attitudes on the basis of rational and/or intentional control may seem to fulfil desideratum D2 for a model of attitudes (as it has been mentioned in the introduction to this thesis). It can be argued that mental states that are subject to rational control and/or intentional control are part of the agent’s moral character, while mental states that are not subject to these kinds of control do not form part of the agent’s moral character. Hence, the standard view seems to be sensitive to the difference between aspects of a person’s psychology that are and that are not constitutive of that person’s moral character. However, in the next chapter I will show that those mental states that are commonly described as implicit attitudes (i.e., those mental states that are measured on indirect measures of attitudes) are, at least to some extent, subject to indirect rational control (i.e., implicit attitudes are indirectly reason-responsive) and indirect intentional control (see section 2.3). I will argue that this suffices to establish that so-called implicit attitudes can in fact reflect on a person’s moral character.
In the second part of the present chapter, I elaborated on the evidence for the standard view that is allegedly provided by attitude measurement data. I gave some examples of direct and indirect measures that supposedly access explicit and implicit attitudes as they have been characterised in the first part of the chapter (section 1.3.1).
Then I discussed how we should interpret dissociations between scores on different attitude measures (section 1.3.2). I argued that even when people give sincere answers on direct measures of attitudes, divergences between people’s responses on indirect and direct measures cannot proof that people possess distinct implicit and explicit attitudes, unless we already adopt a certain account of attitude individuation.
Moreover, I stressed that the dissociation between the outcomes of different indirect measures of attitudes is at least as strong as the dissociation between the outcomes of indirect and direct measures of attitudes. This shows that the dissociations between indirect and direct measures of attitudes deserve no special status when we are theorising about the nature of attitudes. Lastly, I examined in how far results on indirect and direct measures of attitudes are predictive of people’s evaluative responses (section 1.3.3). I pointed out that the results of recent meta-analyses indicate that both indirect and direct measures of attitudes have a relatively low predictive validity. Most remarkably, the evidence suggests that there is no difference in the relative predictive success of indirect measures and direct measures of attitudes across different domains of evaluative responses (including unintentional and intentional responses). This suggest that the distinction between implicit attitudes (as measured on indirect
50 measures of attitudes) and explicit attitudes (as measured on direct measures) may not actually be crucial for the prediction of people’s evaluative responses.
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