Entity Realism about Implicit Attitudes

Implicit attitudes are the unconscious and automatic evaluations people make about objects, persons, and groups. These attitudes have been the subject of much discussion in the social and cognitive psychology literature of the past three decades. This paper explores whether it is justified to hold that implicit attitudes, seen as theoretical entities posited by empirical psychology, are real. We approach this question by drawing on the realism-antirealism debate in philosophy of science. To this end, we compare implicit attitudes with commonsense belief/desire psychology, which, among other things, deploys explicit attitudes to explain behavior. We argue that the traditional arguments for and against realism about commonsense psychology do not apply to the case of implicit attitudes. However, we mount an alternative argument for realism about implicit attitudes, based on the criteria offered by entity realism, namely modifiability, non-redundancy, and robustness. We show that this framework is nicely applicable to implicit attitudes. However, it does not yet justify our belief in these attitudes. In order to take implicit attitudes as real within this entity realist approach, the reproducibility of each implicit measure as well as the correlation between different measures must be increased.