Unspoken Politics
Implicit Attitudes and Political Thinking

This book offers a comprehensive look at the conceptualization, measurement, and political impacts of implicit attitudes.

Efrén O. Pérez (Author)

9781107591219, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 March 2016

228 pages, 41 b/w illus. 19 tables
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.32 kg

'… Unspoken Politics points us in the right direction, serving as an important leap in our understanding of how our unconscious deliberations and judgments matter for our interactions with the political world.' Ashley Jardina, Public Opinion Quarterly

This book explains why people acquire implicit attitudes, how they affect political thinking, and where in the mass public they have their strongest - and weakest - influences. A theoretically ambitious book, Unspoken Politics establishes that implicit attitudes exist outside the tightly controlled confines of the laboratory, showing that they emerge in a public opinion survey setting, which underlines their real-world impact. It also lays bare, in painstaking detail, the mechanics of a leading measure of implicit attitudes, the implicit association test (IAT). Accordingly, it outlines the strengths and limitations of this measure, while providing an illustration of how to develop an IAT for one's own purposes. By explaining how to analyze and interpret the data produced by the IAT, this book leads to a better understanding of people's unspoken cognitions and the impacts these have on the politics that individuals openly profess.

1. Implicit thoughts, explicit decisions
2. Two ways of thinking, two types of attitudes
3. Implicit expectations and explicit political reasoning
4. Ghost in the associative machine
5. Unstated: the measurement of implicit attitudes
6. Incognito: the subconscious nature of implicit expectations
7. In deliberation's shadow: education, (un)awareness, and implicit attitudes
8. In black and white: race, group position, and implicit attitudes in politics
9. Conclusion: implicit attitudes and explicit politics
Note on the studies
References.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]