Unresolved Politics: Implicit Ambivalence and Political Cognition

Date01 September 2021
DOI10.1177/1065912920911100
Published date01 September 2021
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920911100
Political Research Quarterly
2021, Vol. 74(3) 556 –570
© 2020 University of Utah
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DOI: 10.1177/1065912920911100
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Article
Individuals often harbor both positive and negative beliefs
and attitudes toward an object concurrently—a phenome-
non called ambivalence (Kaplan 1972; Scott 1969)—
which has been studied extensively for its relevance to
understanding political attitudes (Alvarez and Brehm
1997; Feldman and Zaller 1992; Keele and Wolak 2008;
Lavine 2001; Rudolph and Popp 2007). Recent work in
social psychology has shown that individuals need not be
consciously aware of their ambivalence for it to exist and
substantially influence how they think and process infor-
mation (Petty et al. 2006). With regard to race, individuals
often exhibit discrepancies between their implicitly and
explicitly measured attitudes, and these discrepancies can
alter how they process race-related information (Johnson
et al. 2017). However, although the distinction between
implicit and explicit preferences has been largely accepted
by public opinion scholars, a framework for conceptual-
izing this distinction when predicting political outcomes
has yet to be developed.
Work in political science and psychology has attempted
to weigh the utility of implicit versus explicit measures of
attitudes when predicting outcomes, but this work
remains largely focused on simply comparing the main
effects of implicit and explicit attitude measures, thus
neglecting the fact that individuals often simultaneously
hold contradictory implicit and explicit preferences.
Alternatively, a promising avenue for understanding how
implicit and explicit cognition affect political evaluations
is to examine individual differences in the correspon-
dence between implicit and explicit attitudes that exist
within individuals. What are the implications of when
someone reports unbiased racial attitudes in a survey yet
exhibits antiblack implicit bias? Conversely, what about
those who express explicit prejudice but show no implicit
bias?
This paper suggests both explicit and implicit attitudes
are central to political cognition and that focusing research
around whether implicit or explicit attitudes better predict
political outcomes is problematic because such research
ignores the unique value of the interplay between implicit
and explicit attitudes as well as the mechanisms underly-
ing each. By neglecting the spectrum upon which attitudes
exist from automatic to controlled, we may be missing a
significant part of the picture and potentially building mis-
leading models of when and how things like racial preju-
dice influence political attitudes. More broadly, neglecting
the interplay between implicit and explicit preferences
911100PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920911100Political Research QuarterlyGonzalez
research-article2020
1The University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
Corresponding Author:
Frank J. Gonzalez, School of Government and Public Policy, The
University of Arizona, 337 Social Sciences Bldg., 1100 E. University
Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85719, USA.
Email: fgonzo@email.arizona.edu
Unresolved Politics: Implicit Ambivalence
and Political Cognition
Frank J. Gonzalez1
Abstract
This paper introduces a novel framework for understanding the relationship between implicit and explicit preferences
and political cognition. Existing work in political psychology focuses primarily on comparing the main effects of
implicit versus explicit attitude measures. This paper rethinks the role of implicit cognition by acknowledging the
correspondence between implicit and explicit preferences (i.e., the distance between implicitly and explicitly measured
attitudes). Data from the 2008 American National Election Study are used to examine implicit racial ambivalence, or
the gap between one’s implicit and explicit racial preferences, as it exists in the United States. Results indicate implicit
racial ambivalence, which has been shown to yield effortful thinking related to race, is negatively related to education
and Need for Cognition, and predicts race-related policy attitudes as well as vote choice in the 2008 election.
Furthermore, implicit ambivalence moderates the influence of ideology on political attitudes, including attitudes
toward outcomes that are only covertly related to race and cannot be predicted directly by implicit or explicit racial
attitudes alone.
Keywords
implicit attitudes, ambivalence, political cognition, ANES, racial attitudes, ideology

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