“Imagine You Are a Film Director...”: Using Hypotheticals to Elicit People’s Implicit Attitudes about Abortion

Early on, researchers discovered that people’s talk about their attitudes and their behavioral manifestations often did not match up. In other words, asking directly about one’s attitudes does not necessarily reflect attitudes implicit to one’s behavior. This may be particularly relevant for socially contentious topics like abortion. Because some attitudes are not directly observable, researchers must figure out how to study them. Most attitude research has been conducted using large-scale surveys and questionnaires. While some survey research has posited scenarios through which respondents can manifest their attitudes, typically, asking people to construct hypothetical narratives is not common practice. However, for this study, we analyzed 155 in-depth interviews conducted in 2021 with English- and Spanish-speaking U.S. adults, asking interviewees to imagine making a movie or documentary about abortion. We used follow-up questions to dive more deeply into the details of their imagined films. These films were remarkably similar despite the interviewees’ placement on a quantitative spectrum of abortion attitudes from anti-abortion to endorsing reproductive choice. The authors used reconstructive techniques such as meaning field and reconstructive horizon analysis to articulate implicit attitudes central to the imagined films—those attitudes included “abortion is a choice,” “imagined gender assumptions about women,” and “abortion itself is unspeakable,” among others. These attitudes were pervasive regardless of the interviewee’s explicit abortion stance. These implicit attitudes emerged through the hypothetical opportunity to talk about abortion. Thus, this methodological paper primarily explores the potential of using hypotheticals in studying particularly polarized or sensitive attitudes.