Self-Insight into Attitudes: Distinguishing Introspective from Social Self-Awareness in Research on Implicit Evaluations

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Conscious awareness has been a topic of contentious debates in many areas of psychology in recent decades, with some researchers claiming that some of our cognitions are consciously inaccessible (Bargh, 1999; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Nosek, 2007), and others more skeptical about this assertion (e.g., Gawronski, Hofmann, & Wilbur, 2006; Newell & Shanks, 2014). In social psychology, this is reflected in discussions around implicit social cognition and specifically implicit attitudes (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), but precise models with testable predictions about the phenomenology and the determinants of awareness in implicit social cognition are currently lacking. The purpose of the current proposal is to test and validate a model that distinguishes between two different types of self-awareness that are phenomenologically distinct, depend on different cognitive processes, require different methods of analysis, and may clarify existing confusions in the field. Whereas introspective self-awareness is concerned with a person's ability to access and report on his or her own cognitions, social self-awareness describes whether a person has an accurate sense of how his or her cognitions compare to the cognitions of others. In my previous work on attitudes (Hahn, Judd, Hirsh, & Blair, 2014) we found that participants were accurate at reporting their individual patterns of the reactions reflected in implicit evaluations (high introspective awareness). However, they appeared to have limited insight into how their reactions compared to the reactions of others (limited social self-awareness), and this effect appears to have contributed to researchers' misperception that implicit evaluations reflect unconscious attitudes. Hence, the distinction presented here may clarify previous misunderstandings by delineating specifically of which aspects of their cognitions people may be more or less aware. However, they do not yet shed insight onto what factors and processes determine the different types of awareness. The goal of the current proposal is to test and validate a new model that leads to many novel predictions about the determinants of each of the two types of self-awareness in attitudes. My objective is to develop a nomenclature of the factors involved in conscious awareness in attitudes and implicit evaluations that will allow for much more nuanced discussions than is currently possible. This will both clarify our understanding of this aspect of human consciousness, as well as inform applied research on important societal issues such as stereotyping and prejudice.