SOC Seminar Series
Speaker
Dr. Benedek KurdiLocation
Psych East, 3834Info
International Trends In Explicit And Implicit Social Group Attitudes (2009–2019)
The study of attitudes (evaluations of social entities along a positive–negative continuum) has been at the center of social psychological research since at least the 1930s. When and how attitudes change informs both accounts about fundamental processes of social learning and memory and translational endeavors of intervening on pernicious social group biases. Attitude change has traditionally been studied with a focus on short-term change, at the level of individuals, and using the experimental method. However, large- scale continuous data collection via the Project Implicit educational website (http://implicit.harvard.edu/) now makes it possible to investigate how social group attitudes have changed in the long term, at the level of societies, and in response to cultural inputs. In this talk, I will use data from 1.2 million+ participants across 33 countries, drawn from the openly available Project Implicit International Dataset (Charlesworth, Navon, et al., 2023), to ask whether and how explicit (self-reported) and implicit (automatically revealed) attitudes toward five social group targets (age, body weight, sexuality, skin tone, and race) changed around the world between 2009 and 2019. In addition to presenting overall trends, I will decompose results into age, period, and cohort effects; review cross-country variability; compare findings to the same time window in the United States; discuss key demographic differences; and identify the most important ecological correlates of change. I will conclude by highlighting implications of the observed patterns of stability and change for both theoretical accounts of social cognitive processes and the possibility of positive societal change.
