Measuring attitudes: explicit and implicit approaches

Because attitudes are internal constructs, their measurement presents certain challenges. Social psychologists have developed various techniques for assessing attitudes, which can generally be classified into explicit (direct) measures and implicit (indirect) measures.

Explicit Measures: Self-Reports

Explicit measures are those in which people are directly asked about their attitudes. The most common form is self-report scales.

• Likert-Type Scales: These are widely used. They consist of a series of statements about the attitude object, and participants are asked to indicate their degree of agreement or disagreement with each statement on a graduated scale (e.g., from 1 "strongly disagree" to 5 or 7 "strongly agree"). The total or average score reflects the person's attitude.

• Semantic Differential: This technique asks people to rate the attitude object on a series of bipolar scales anchored by opposing adjectives (e.g., good-bad, strong-weak, active-passive).

Although explicit measures are easy to administer, they may be subject to social desirability biases (people responding in socially acceptable ways rather than expressing their true attitude) or a lack of insight into one's attitudes.

Implicit Measures: Automatic Evaluations

Implicit measures attempt to assess attitudes without the person being aware that their evaluations are being measured, or without them being able to easily control their responses.

These techniques seek to capture the automatic, unconscious associations that people have toward an attitude object.

Implicit Association Test (IAT): This is one of the best-known implicit measures. It measures the strength of associations between concepts (e.g., social groups) and evaluations (e.g., good/bad) based on participants' response speed when classifying stimuli.

It is assumed that stronger associations are reflected in faster reaction times when congruent concepts and evaluations are paired.

Other implicit measures may include affective priming or the analysis of nonverbal communication.

Complementarity of Measures

Both explicit and implicit measures have their advantages and limitations. Often, explicit and implicit attitudes toward the same object may not perfectly match.

For example, a person may explicitly express egalitarian attitudes toward a social group,but show implicit biases in an IAT.

The combined use of different types of measures can provide a more complete and nuanced understanding of people's attitudes, capturing both conscious, controlled evaluations and automatic, less conscious associations.