Implicit-Explicit Incongruence: The Dual Structure of Public Value Preferences in Civil Servants

Research on public value preferences (PVPs) among civil servants is a key area in public value studies. However, existing research on PVPs has not considered their implicit dimensions, which largely limits the understanding of the concept’s structure and measurement. Drawing on the dual-attitudes model from social psychology, this article proposes an explicit–implicit dual structure of PVPs and empirically tests this structure using a quasi-experimental design. The sample comprised a civil servant group (n = 109) and a non‑civil servant group (n = 116). Findings show that civil servants’ PVPs have a two-dimensional structure of explicit and implicit: Compared with non-civil servants, civil servants have more positive explicit PVPs but relatively negative implicit PVPs. This study systematically examines the existence, direction, and magnitude of the incongruence between civil servants’ implicit and explicit PVPs, offering a more cognitively complex theoretical framework for PVPs.