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Overriding Implicit Attitudes
How to overcome your hindering implicit attitudes
If a way of seeing others or ourselves is accompanied by an evaluative aspect, psychologists speak of an attitude. We constantly judge persons, actions, ideas, but also things or events as being good or bad, likable or unlikable, attractive or repulsive, moral or immoral. Our behavior is unconsciously influenced by the attitudes we maintain. Here’s how to override your hindering implicit attitudes.
Early social psychologists like Gordon Allport studied attitudes to see if they would predict how someone would behave under certain circumstances. One major finding is a difference between explicit and implicit attitudes. We actively maintain explicit attitudes and express them verbally and consciously. We are aware of these attitudes and cultivate them.
For instance, in a work environment, you might maintain the attitude that decision making should take place at the lowest possible levels in the organization and that there should be as few levels as possible anyway — very much in line with popular agile-minded theories around organizational structuring, as the idea of a teal organization, as presented by Belgian organizational consultant Frederic Laloux, in his 2014 book “Reinventing Organizations”. Whenever discussions arise around decision-making, you promote your attitude that the decision-making should take place on the workfloor rather than in the ivory management tower.
We also maintain implicit attitudes. These attitudes manifest themselves as automatic mental associations that influence our behavior unconsciously. A great test that psychologists have devised, is to measure the time that is needed to associate two words. If the time is short, the two words are easily mentally connected, and the association is called strong. If you’re quicker to associate the word “management” with positive words like “intelligent”, “hard-working”, or “decisive”, then to associate the word “management” with negative words like “short-sighted”, “dictatorial”, or “self-serving”, then your implicit attitude towards management is positive. If you responded quicker to the negative words that means your implicit attitude towards management is negative.
