Subconsciousness

Research on social judgment typically emphasizes one of three processes that enable unequivocal understanding of events with ambiguous causality. In the social influence perspective, people are susceptible to the interpretations offered by others. In the explicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with their consciously held attitudes and values. In the implicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with unconscious biases. The model investigated in the present study assumes that these processes vary in salience depending on people's mindset. Participants with low versus high implicit racial bias toward Blacks read a narrative concerning this altercation under either a lowlevel or a high-level mindset and then read a summary that blamed one of the parties or they did not read a summary. As predicted, low-level participants allocated responsibility to the African-American if they had a high implicit racial bias and to the White if they had a low implicit racial bias, regardless of the summary manipulation. Contrary to prediction, however, high-level participants' allocation of responsibility did not reflect their explicit prejudicial attitudes. Instead, they corrected for their implicit biases in their trait inferences and affective reactions, in line with research suggesting that a high-level mindset promotes self-regulatory processes in social judgment.

Perceiver's use of thought suppression to maintain a consistent attitude toward another person ironically leads to nonlinear changes in their evaluations over time. In this study of interpersonal evaluation, 157 participants across three conditions (high-level mindset, low-level mindset, and control) observe the same person in seven counter-balanced videotaped social interactions depicting helpful, rude, and ambiguous behaviors. The high-level prime instructed participants to focus on the target's goals and intentions ; low-level participants focused on the target's specific concrete behaviors. High-level participants better resisted the influence of conflicting information by surpressing thoughts inconsistent with their initial evaluation of the target. From the dynamical systems perspective, such suppressed information over time becomes organized as an alternative attractor, nonconsciously influencing the perceiver's cognitive system, leading to change away from an initial attitude, as measured by the Mouse Paradigm procedure.