Editorial: Implicit Cognition

Human actions and thoughts can be intentionally controlled to achieve current behavioral goals. We believe that we can access the contents of the mind explicitly. However, this apparently adaptive cognitive system cannot function without help from the implicit side. Although there is no doubt that explicitly acquired knowledge serves as the foundation of our activities, it is also true that experiences acquired through implicit processing of the environment affect various aspects of behavior, such as perception, learning, decision-making, and social interactions. This simple and effective dual system can be found in a variety of domains in psychology (Evans & Stanovich, 2013; Shulman et al., 2016). For example, an emotional experience requires integration of implicit physical arousal and conscious cognitive interpretation of that arousal (Schacter & Singer, 1962). In cognitive psychology, studies have shown that the identification of objects can be improved by various cues, even when observers do not notice those cues (Neely, 1977). The memory system consists of two major processing types: effortful, explicit declarative memory that is accompanied by conscious recall; and automatic, implicit nondeclarative memory that comes without conscious experience (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968; Henke, 2010). In social psychology, it is known that explicit attitudes can be influenced by social desirability and, thus, implicit attitudes have independent predictive validity over explicit measures. Recently, unconscious bias, also referred to as implicit bias, has become a well-known bias in applied psychology, especially in diversity education programs. The purpose of this special issue is to highlight the multiple aspects of implicit cognition. Devos and Anderson (2019) have focused on what kinds of people are considered to be “Americans” at the implicit level, which is called implicit ethnic-American associations, in their article entitled “Are We In or Are We Out? Ingroup Prototypicality Effects in Implicit Ethnic-American Associations.” They documented “ingroup prototypicality effects” across four studies. Their excellent article includes clear arguments and appropriate methods consisting of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) developed in an orthodox and productive manner. In Study 1, they compared implicit ethnic-American associations among European, Latino, and Asian American students attending universities on the West Coast of the United States. In Study 2, they compared implicit ethnic-American associations among European, Latino, and African American university students in the southern part of the United States. In the subsequent Studies 3 and 4, they used implicit association data collected through the Project Implicit website. The authors examined the role of the ethnicity and region of residence (America/Asia/Europe/Canada) in Studies 3 and 4. The results showed that the implicit ingroup prototypicality effects appear consistently, and documented distinct effects of ethnicity and region of residence. This special issue includes another study that deals with implicit social stereotypes: the article by Goto, Ichimura, Oka, Kawamura, and Kusumi (2019), entitled “Trait-Related Concepts Activate Stereotypically Consistent Concepts on the Same Stereotype Dimension, But May not Spread to the Other Stereotype Dimension.” Warmth and competence are two dimensions constituting the stereotype content model. It is hypothesized and found that activating one characteristic concept (dimension) does not spread to the other characteristic concept. The authors tested this hypothesis based on research by Lenton, Blair, and Hastie (2001), using the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Study 1 conceptually replicated the findings of Lenton et al. Study 2 showed the results supporting the hypothesis mentioned above, that is, exposure to gender-stereotype-related concepts induced false recognition of non-presented words on the same dimension, but did not induce false recognition on another dimension. The results of both Studies 1 and 2 are clear, and it seems that the results of Study 2 advanced the results of widely known previous research performed by Lenton et al. The theoretical implications of these findings will be investigated in further research. Even in the domain of problem-solving, we enjoy contributions of implicit mechanisms in terms of insights. Orita and Hattori (2019) have examined the influence of affective states on the use of implicit hints when solving insight problems. In their research, entitled “Positive and Negative Affects Facilitate Insight Problem-Solving in Different Ways: A Study with Implicit Hints,” they conducted two experiments, both with Duncker's (1945) radiation problem as an insight problem. When primed with a hint, positive affect inhibited the number of incorrect solutions generated in the first experiment and increased the number of correct solutions in the second experiment. In contrast, negative affect enhanced the participants’ performance regardless of the presence of hints across the two experiments. These results indicate that positive and negative affects facilitate insight problem-solving in different ways. It seems that a positive affect implicitly prompts the acceptance of cues and broadens people's search of a problem space, and a negative affect encourages people to intensively focus on solving the insight task. The results suggest a resolution of a long-standing debate on the effectiveness of positive versus negative affect in solving a problem. Karasawa, Asai, and Hioki's (2019) study, entitled “Psychological Essentialism at the Explicit and Implicit Levels: The Unique Status of Social Categories,” is about psychological essentialism. This is the idea that we humans tend to perceive commonalities among category members, such that infants categorize living things (e.g., dogs and fish) together and differentiate artifacts (e.g., chairs and buildings). The authors have focused on unique characteristics of social categories against natural-kind and human artifacts. Their hypothesis was that essentialist beliefs about social categories could be readily detectable on an implicit measure more than on an explicit measure. However, essentialist versus non-essentialist judgments concerning natural-kind and human artifact categories could be observed in both implicit and explicit measures. After identifying that entitativity and naturalness are the common underlying dimensions across these three categorical domains by using factor analysis, the authors found that social categories were essentialized to a greater extent at the implicit level by using a Go/No-Go Association Task-like judgment task. The issue of perceiving a category as natural or artificial is critical for education because it would be difficult to modify implicit beliefs regarding natural (i.e., perceived innate) characteristics, including some stereotypes and prejudices. In this respect, Ishii, Numazaki, and Tado'oka (2019) found an intriguing effect of colors of clothing on gender stereotypes and sex role attitudes. In their article, entitled “The Effect of Pink/Blue Clothing on Implicit and Explicit Gender-Related Self-Cognition and Attitudes Among Men,” the authors had male participants wear a pink or blue coat and administered an IAT and explicit inventories. Interestingly, the authors introduced the factor of self-esteem on the grounds that individuals with low self-esteem would be susceptible to the effects of priming, which is what the authors found. The results indicated that there are interactions between self-esteem and implicit/explicit attitudes. Participants with low self-esteem exhibited stronger self–feminine associations in the pink clothing than those in the blue clothing condition. Thus, wearing pink clothing could reduce gender stereotypes and traditional gender-related role attitudes. The article by Tanaka and Ikegami (2019) is a well-organized paper in implicit social cognition research because the study adopted covert attentional bias measurement, in contrast to previous research that may reflect processing both in overt and covert attention, and gained new findings. “Social Exclusion and Disengagement of Covert Attention from Social Signs: The Moderating Role of Fear of Negative Evaluation” examines the effects of social exclusion on information processing for subsequent stimuli. Social exclusion had different influences on individuals with low versus high fear of negative evaluation (FNE). The authors adopted covert attentional bias measurement, unlike previous research, and showed that social exclusion delayed disengagement of covert attention from facial stimuli, regardless of the types of expression, only in individuals with low FNE. Thus, social exclusion enhanced attention to social information only among individuals with low FNE. Finally, the article by Sawaumi, Inagaki, and Aikawa (2019), entitled “Does Conventional Implicit Association Test of Shyness Measure ‘Self-Shyness’ or ‘Others-Shyness’?” contains a methodological challenge. As is widely known, implicit associations obtained by the IAT are measured by the difference between response latencies for two contrasting concepts. That is, in the conventional IAT method, implicit shyness is measured by the difference between the implicit association of shyness with the self (“self-shy”) and the implicit association of shyness with others (“others-shy”). The authors adopted the Single-Target IAT (ST-IAT) to measure implicit association for self-shy and others-shy separately. That enabled them to test the following research question: “How will implicit shyness assessed using conventional IAT be explained by ‘self-shy’ and ‘others-shy,’ both measured by the Single-Target Implicit Association Test (ST-IAT)?” The results showed that (a) implicit shyness assessed using conventional IAT correlated only with self-shy, and (b) implicit shyness was accounted for by both self-shy and others-shy in regression analysis, but it was accounted for largely by self-shy. The findings in this research provide a new viewpoint. The purpose of this special issue, “Implicit Cognition,” is to highlight the diversity of implicit cognition research that has been achieved to date. As detailed by Greenwald and Banaji (2017), there have been long-standing theoretical and empirical struggles to investigating the unconscious in psychological research. The image of the iceberg on the cover of this special issue represents the profoundness of this scientific challenge. Implicit cognition research has a wide range of applications in all fields of psychological science (for example, Nosek et al., 2009). We hope this special issue will pave the way for new scientific insights into the area of the unconscious. This special issue on implicit cognition will be one step in a long journey exploring the nature of unconsciousness in contemporary psychological science.

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