The race issues are perhaps the most debatable ones within the polemic of civic rights and attitudes. As such, there have been two articles written in order to differentiate implicit and explicit attitudes of people towards race issues. It is important to understand the origins of implicit attitudes, so the article Evidence of Race Evaluations From Ages 6 and 10 and Adulthood gives an explicit explanation on that. Moreover, once it is understood what the implicit and explicit attitudes are it is important to comprehend how those are formed. The article Sources of Implicit Attitudes elaborates on it substantially.
Interestingly, people start hiding their true attitudes at the age of 10. This is when it is crucial to distinguish explicit attitude and the implicit one. There were different age groups investigated in the matter of race attitude expression. And there were only the 6-year-old kids telling what they really felt. 10 year-olds and grown-ups were already controlling themselves when answering the questions. The reason kindergarten children were expressing their implicit attitude was because of their extremely young age and absence of explicit attitudes due to immature implicit one yet. Therefore, the sources of implicit attitudes are mainly the episodes when people get their first impressions and experiences. The latter form self-reported attitudes at kids’ age. However, even if a grown-up reports the experience to be perfect it does not mean it is really so. The reason is that adults tend to report explicit attitude according to the current events, forgetting about implicit ones if those were unpleasant. The culturally held appraisals essentially influence people’s bias (Rudman, 2004, p. 81).
To prolong the study experiment it would be necessary to find out the circumstances under which the implicit attitudes form. It is extremely important to understand that implicit and explicit attitudes rarely converge, though this frequency is hard to determine. That is why there should be the polls held in order to question groups of adult people on the matter of circumstances under which they have acquired any specific attitude. Most likely, this will derive a substantial collection of circumstantial patterns that can be respectfully divided into groups. Evidently, this should be done in order to examine people’s reactions to the circumstances underwent, this will make it possible to trace the way implicit and explicit attitudes converge rather than relying on controlling of explicit attitude only. The importance of such study experiment is crucial because this way it becomes highly possible to control societal issues through getting explicit responses and interpreting them correctly.
As per the age group of 10-year-old kids describes in The Development of Implicit Attitudes, the authors claimed that the implicit attitude is changed by more conscious attitude around age 10 (Baron, 2006, p. 56). It is said that this alternation around the age of 10 allows tracing the differences between conscious and unconscious. In order to improve the results of the study it is necessary to take into consideration the mindset of children. Of course, education and parents’ attitudes are crucial in this case. However, the mental structure – pertaining to the humanities or mathematics – will have a great influence on how a child accept and absorbs education, social conditions, and parents’ attitudes, as well. This is important to make a study completely all—rounded because it examines the current social issues.
References
- Baron, S.A. (2006). The Development of Implicit Attitudes. Evidence of Race Evaluations From Ages 6 and 10 and Adulthood. Psychological Science. 17(1), 53-58.
- Rudman, L. A. (2004). Sources of Implicit Attitudes. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(2), 79-82.