Social Cognition, Implicit Attitude Theory And Experimental Study

Attitude is the central topic of social psychology which plays a important role in analyzing the theoretical framework of human behavior .The main purpose of this research is to study attitude in term of unconsciousness. With the proceeding of modern cognitive psychology and implicit memory, there's a intergradation between social psychology and cognitive psychology, a new subject named implicit social cognition is then set up. It emphasizes the process of social cognition and mental processing in social context. As the importance of attitude in social cognition, the study of implicit attitude is currently the necessary issue to be resolved.There're two sections in this dissertation. In the theory section, the researcher gives a summary of research literature in the field of attitude in recent years, such as the phenomena of implicit attitude, theory of attitude ambivalence, dual-process model of attitude and the anchoring-and- adjustment model of attitude change, and illustrates the rationality of the concept of implicit attitude. Combining implicit attitude and the anchoring-and-adjustment model of attitude change, the author bring forward a dual-attitude model., which assumes that there're different evaluations of the same attitude object: an automatic attitude and an explicit attitude. The behavior that people endorses depends on the attitude that people endorses. Also ,the author gives experimental proof in relative field and attitude field.In the experiment section, there're three experiments investigating implicit attitude and dual-attitude model. In the first experiment, the author studies the effects of attitude strengthen on attitude's automatic activation effect. In the second experiment , the author studies the effect of delay condition on the attitude's automatic activation effect. Delay condition make experiment approach to mere exposure of attitude object, and two experiment demonstrate attitude's automatic activation effect is the result of noncognitive processing. In the third experiment ,according to the paradigm of attitude's automatic activation effect, experimental control make subject's attitude change ,Experiment use time-stress as independent variable , subject's attitude change as dependent variable. As a result subject report their implicit attitude in the time-stress condition , report explicit attitude in the unlimited time condition , subject's confidence in their evalution is the factor affecting dual-attitude.