De-Freuding Implicit Attitudes
De-Freuding Implicit Attitudes
Psychologists and philosophers treat implicit attitudes as automatic and unconscious mental states—a view reminiscent of Freud’s theory of unconscious desires and urges. I present a competing view about the nature of attitudes, and show that it is better supported by the empirical evidence. I argue that attitudes are not mental states at all; a fortiori, they are not unconscious and automatic mental states. Rather, they are traits—viz. multitrack dispositions to behave and cognize in valenced ways. On this view, then, there are no implicit attitudes. This characterization (“the trait picture of attitudes”) provides the best explanation of several puzzling properties found in the psychology of attitudes, such as the weak correlations between indirect measures of alleged implicit attitudes, their contextual variation, and the low predictive validity of the measures of alleged implicit attitudes.
Keywords: attitudes, automaticity, unconscious, traits, multitrack dispositions, mental states, predictive validity, contextual variation
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
