Awareness of implicit evaluations reexamined: Large-scale tests in two experimental paradigms

The influential idea that implicit evaluations reside beyond conscious awareness has been challenged by accumulating evidence demonstrating that participants can predict their implicit evaluations highly accurately. However, this work faces a key limitation: Because past tests have involved well-known targets (e.g., racial groups), successful implicit evaluation predictions may have emerged from inferential mechanisms drawing on various sources of knowledge about those targets rather than privileged introspection (e.g., explicit evaluations). Here we report eight experiments (five preregistered; N = 6,794) in which implicit evaluations and their explicit counterparts were experimentally induced, which removes the accumulated knowledge associated with well-known attitude targets. Critically, implicit and explicit evaluations were manipulated to shift in opposite directions, thus eliminating the latter as a source of inference. Under these conditions, mean-level implicit evaluation predictions (β = 0.37) were directionally consistent with explicit (β = 0.59) rather than implicit evaluations (β = 0.22). Moreover, although predictions and implicit evaluations were associated with each other at the individual level (β = 0.30), the relationship was driven almost entirely by participants with directionally consistent (β = 0.35) rather than dissociated implicit and explicit evaluations (β = 0.06). These results generalized across two learning paradigms (impression formation and attribute conditioning), two implicit evaluation measures (IAT and EPT), and between-participant and within-participant designs. The present findings are challenging to reconcile with the notion of privileged introspective access to experimentally induced implicit evaluations and suggest that inference — rather than introspection — may play a central role in successful implicit evaluation predictions.