The Hidden Side of Peace

Abstract: Introduction: Attitudes toward peace are complex and multifaceted, encompassing both explicit beliefs and implicit cognitive processes. While explicit attitudes have been widely studied, implicit peace-related cognitions remain underexplored. Aim: This study examined implicit and explicit attitudes toward peace using complementary behavioral and self-report measures to assess their convergent validity. Methods: Eighty-six participants (47 females, 36 males, and 3 nonbinary; M = 26.8 years, SD = 5.1; age range = 18–40) were recruited from two regions of Italy (Calabria and Sicily). They completed three tasks: (1) an adapted Implicit Association Test (IAT) assessing automatic associations between peace- and war-related concepts, on the one hand, and positive and negative attributes, on the other; (2) a Lexical Decision Task (LDT) measuring semantic accessibility of peace- and violence-related words; and (3) the Peace Attitude Scale (PAS), a self-report measure of explicit attitudes toward peace. Results: Participants showed significantly faster responses to peace-related words than to violence-related words in the LDT. In the IAT, reaction times were faster in the congruent condition (peace–positive) than in the incongruent condition (peace–negative), with a mean D score indicating strong implicit pro-peace associations. Correlational analyses revealed small-to-moderate positive associations between PAS scores and both the LDT bias score and the IAT D score. Discussion/conclusion: These findings suggest that implicit and explicit measures tap into related but distinct components of peace-related cognition. Implicit tasks such as the IAT and LDT can capture automatic evaluative and semantic associations beyond the reach of self-report, offering a more comprehensive understanding of attitudes toward peace.