台大心理系

Social evaluations are often described as being highly recalcitrant in the face of novel information. Under dominant theoretical perspectives, the primary culprit for such recalcitrance — both in the moment and in the long term — are the implicit (automatic) aspects of social cognitive processes. In this talk, I will review evidence, accumulated over the past decade in my lab and others, that suggests that implicit social evaluations, like their more explicit (controlled) counterparts, are capable not only of displaying short-term malleability but even of undergoing enduring, long-term change. Notably, relevant evidence comes not only from experimental studies involving novel targets (which have been critical to documenting underlying cognitive mechanisms), but also from experimental studies involving preexisting targets of consequence, the longitudinal tracking of international students as they acculturate into U.S. environments, and time-series analyses of cross-sectional data collected from millions of online participants in the United States and beyond. Together, these studies reveal implicit social evaluations to be remarkably amenable to flexible and adaptive updating, with implications for both basic social psychological theory and the prospect of social change toward more egalitarian intergroup relations.