The Activation And Change Of The Implicit Attitude Toward Other Countries

The public’s implicit attitude toward other countries is fairly important in the realm of implicit social cognition, but few studies have been found. Along with the globalization and informatization, also with the increasingly influence of the public opinion in policy making, it’s very important to study how to change the public’s attitude toward other countries.In order to deepen the understanding of the mechanism of the activation and changing of implicit attitude, we compared the Balanced Identity Theory (BIT), the Associative-Propositional Evaluation model(APE), and the Iterative Reprocessing model(IR). The BIT emphasizes on the mechanism of the Social Knowledge Structure (SKS), namely the building and changing of the association between the attitude target and the attribute. The APE describes the interaction of the implicit attitude and the explicit attitude, and the possible approaches to changing implicit and explicit attitude. The IR describes the neural mechanism of attitude activation and expression, and emphasizes the close interrelation of implicit and explicit attitude. The 3 models are complementary and can be put together to further understand implicit attitude.To strengthen the logical promise of our study, the event related potential was employed to explore the activation of the attitude toward other countries. The result showed that the negative targets evoked larger P200 and smaller N300 than positive targets, and larger LPP especially in the frontal and parietal-occipital area in the right hemisphere. The pattern was in accordance with the IR, showing that the attitude toward other countries could be activated automatically, and the implicit attitude was confirmed.The commonly used approaches to changing implicit attitude, such as the familiarity effect and affective conditioning, were low in ecological validity. According to the 8 approaches proposed by APE. we used the central persuading path, providing rich persuasive information. Such approach had been proved by recent experiments to be feasible, thus broadened the methods of changing implicit attitudes.According to the BIT, we proposed 3 different ways to organize the persuasive information. The first was to make the subjects form "friend" vs. "enemy" identity toward other countries. The second was to make the subject form "benevolent" vs. "malevolent" attribution of other countries" behavior. The third way was to selectively emphasize the "merit" vs. "fault" of other countries. In the 3 ways, the relevance between the information and the "self of the subjects decreased, and the effect of attitude change was expected to decrease in turn.4 experiments were carried to check the effects. All the experiments employed between-subject repeated-measure design. In each experiment, the baseline attitude was measured, and the participants were randomly assigned into 2 groups, accepting revised manipulation respectively. After that, the attitude was measured.The results of experiment 2 showed that the "friend" vs. "enemy" identity could significantly form new attitude toward virtual targets.The results of experiment3 showed that the "friend" vs. "enemy" identity could significantly change the implicit attitude toward the real-life targets.The results of experiment 4 showed that "benevolent" vs. "malevolent" attribution could significantly change the explicit attitude but only had marginal effect in implicit attitude change.The results of experiment 5 showed that "merit" vs. "fault" stress couldn’t change the implicit attitude, and only had marginal effect on explicit change.Taken together, the results were consistent with the expectation drawn from the BIT, showing that the changing of implicit attitude relied on the capability to build strong association between the target and the "’self".