Benedek Kurdi

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Psychology

Influential classic and contemporary accounts have posited that implicit attitudes reside beyond conscious awareness. This idea has been challenged by robust evidence demonstrating that participants can predict their own implicit attitudes highly accurately. However, past tests have all been conducted using well-known targets (e.g., racial groups),...

Computational theories of reinforcement learning suggest that two families of algorithm—“model-based” vs. “model-free”—tightly map onto the classic distinction between automatic and deliberate systems of control: Deliberate evaluative responses are thought to reflect model-based algorithms, which are accurate but computationally expensive, whereas...

Five studies examined implicit (IAT) attitudes toward the slurs n***er and n***a among Black and White Americans (total N = 3,226). Both groups showed strong implicit negativity toward n***er/a combined relative to socially acceptable contrast terms such as Black or African American. Controlling for baseline Black-White race attitudes, Black Americ...

Of the 330 million residents of the United States, over 40 million were born abroad. Such individuals are routinely referred to using labels such as “alien,” “foreigner,” and “noncitizen.” In this multimethod project relying on data from 5,437 U.S. citizens in experimental studies and 125,126 U.S. citizens in archival studies, we examine implicit (...

Following decades of experimental investigations involving individual participants, large-scale open data and computational advances newly enable the study of how social attitudes have changed over the long term, at the level of societies. In this project, we harness data from the Project Implicit International Dataset (Charlesworth et al., 2023),...

Open data collected from research participants creates a tension between scholarly values of transparency and sharing, on the one hand, and privacy and security, on the other hand. A common solution is to make data sets anonymous by removing personally identifying information (e.g., names or worker IDs) before sharing. However, ostensibly anonymize...

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is a measure of implicit evaluations, designed to index the automatic retrieval of evaluative knowledge. The AMP effect consists in participants evaluating neutral target stimuli positively when preceded by positive primes and negatively when preceded by negative primes. After multiple prior tests of intent...

Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) demonstrated that exposure to positive Black exemplars (e.g., Colin Powell) and negative White exemplars (e.g., Jeffrey Dahmer) can reduce implicit pro-White/anti-Black evaluations, as measured by an Implicit Association Test. Here, we report seven preregistered online experiments conducted with volunteer U.S. particip...

Open data collected from humans creates a tension between scholarly values of transparency and sharing on the one hand, and privacy and security on the other. A common solution is to make datasets anonymous by removing personally identifying information before sharing. However, ostensibly anonymized datasets may be at risk of re-identification if t...

People can predict their scores on the Implicit Association Test with remarkable accuracy, challenging the traditional notion that implicit attitudes are inaccessible to introspection and suggesting that people might be aware of these attitudes. Yet, major open questions about the mechanism and scope of these predictions remain, making their implic...

Across seven preregistered studies in online adult volunteer samples ( N = 5,323), we measured implicit evaluations of social groups following exposure to historical narratives about their oppression. Although the valence of such information is highly negative and its interpretation was left up to participants, implicit evaluations of oppressed gro...

This multimethod project investigates discrimination against members of two populous minority groups in the European Union: the Roma (numbering 6 million) and the disabled (numbering 100 million) on a leading Hungarian carpooling platform. In a field experiment, 1005 ride requests were sent to drivers, with passenger group membership (control, disa...

Dasgupta and Greenwald (2001) demonstrated that exposure to positive Black exemplars (e.g., Colin Powell) and negative White exemplars (e.g., Jeffrey Dahmer) can reduce implicit pro-White/anti-Black evaluations, as measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT). Here we report seven preregistered online experiments conducted with volunteer U.S. par...

According to early theories, implicit (automatic) social attitudes are difficult if not impossible to change. Although this view has recently been challenged by research relying on experimental, developmental, and cultural approaches, relevant work remains siloed across research communities. As such, the time is ripe to systematize and integrate di...

Although negative implicit (automatic) evaluations of even well-known social targets can show remarkable temporary shifts toward positivity, experimental demonstrations of lasting negative-to-positive implicit attitude change are absent from the literature. Here we report 7 experiments (6 preregistered; n = 2,337) that used novel social targets to...

“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of developm...

Due to its underregulated nature, the rapidly growing sharing economy can be a breeding ground for group-based disparities. Here we investigate discrimination on a leading Hungarian carpooling app against members of the two largest minority groups in the European Union: the Roma (numbering 6 million) and the disabled (numbering 100 million). In a f...

Based on 660 effect sizes obtained from 23,255 adult participants across 51 reports of experimental studies, this meta-analysis investigates whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (indirectly revealed) evaluations reflect relational information (how stimuli are related to each other) over and above co-occurrence information (the fac...

Based on 660 effect sizes obtained from 23,255 adult participants across 51 reports of experimental studies, this meta-analysis investigates whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (indirectly revealed) evaluations reflect relational information (how stimuli are related to each other) over and above co-occurrence information (the fac...

The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is a measure of implicit evaluations, designed to index the automatic (unintentional) retrieval of evaluative knowledge. The AMP effect consists in participants evaluating neutral target stimuli more positively when preceded by positive primes and more negatively when preceded by negative primes. Hughes et...

The material in The Cognitive Unconscious began as a master’s thesis that examined the manner in which knowledge of fairly complex, patterned material could be acquired without any conscious effort to learn it and with little to no awareness of what had been learned. It was dubbed implicit learning and, over more than fifty years, became a vigorous...

The material in The Cognitive Unconscious began as a master’s thesis that examined the manner in which knowledge of fairly complex, patterned material could be acquired without any conscious effort to learn it and with little to no awareness of what had been learned. It was dubbed implicit learning and, over more than fifty years, became a vigorous...

Causal relationships, unlike mere co-occurrence, allow humans to obtain rewards and avoid punishments by intervening on their environment. Accordingly, explicit (controlled) evaluations of stimuli encountered in the environment are known to be sensitive to causal relationships above and beyond mere co-occurrence. In this project, we conduct stringe...

Recent work found that people can predict their scores on the Implicit Association Test with remarkable accuracy, challenging the traditional notion that implicit attitudes are inaccessible to introspection and suggesting that people might be aware of these attitudes. Yet, there are major open questions about the mechanism and scope of these predic...

Moran et al. (2021) report a multi-lab registered replication of Olson and Fazio’s (2001) surveillance task. The surveillance task is an incidental learning procedure over the course of which participants observe pairings of conditioned stimuli (CSs) and unconditioned stimuli (USs) while engaging in a distracting secondary task. Unaware evaluative...

For decades, researchers across the social sciences have sought to document and explain the worldwide variation in social group attitudes (evaluative representations, e.g., young–good/old–bad) and stereotypes (attribute representations, e.g., male–science/female–arts). Indeed, uncovering such country-level variation can provide key insights into qu...

We highlight several sets of findings from the past decade elucidating the relationship between implicit social cognition and real-world inequality: Studies focusing on practical ramifications of implicit social cognition in applied contexts, the relationship between implicit social cognition and consequential real-world outcomes at the level of in...

In this commentary we review how implicit measures of bias have been and continue to be critical for addressing two related questions: (i) what is the nature of unintentional bias? and (ii) what is the cognitive architecture of bias? We show how implicit measures fuel progress on both of these issues while, crucially, also advancing the translation...

“A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies. The son is rushed to the ER. The attending surgeon looks at the boy and says, ‘I can't operate on this boy. He's my son!’ How can this be?” Fifty years after the riddle first received public attention, one likely answer proves elusive: the surgeon is the boy's mother. Seven studies (N =...

For decades, researchers across the social sciences have sought to document and explain the worldwide variation in social group attitudes (evaluative representations, e.g., young-good/old-bad) and stereotypes (attribute representations, e.g., male–science/female–arts). Indeed, uncovering such country-level variation can provide key insights into qu...

Four studies involving 2552 White American participants were conducted to investigate bias based on the race-based phenotype of hair texture. Specifically, we probed the existence and magnitude of bias in favor of Eurocentric (straight) over Afrocentric (curly) hair and its specificity in predicting responses to a legal decision involving the pheno...

In this chapter, we review implicit person memory: studies using implicit measures to examine how evaluations of and beliefs about individual human targets are acquired and how they shift in the face of new information. In doing so we distinguish between papers that have (a) used implicit person memory as a case study of relatively domain-general p...

Implicit evaluations can be malleable via reinterpretation of previously encountered evidence. Here, we report three studies ( N = 1,007) investigating the robustness of this updating modality using ecologically realistic materials. Participants were first introduced to a target who killed an endangered black rhino in Namibia. They then listened to...

Explicit (directly measured) evaluations are widely assumed to be sensitive to logical structure. However, whether implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are uniquely sensitive to co-occurrence information or can also reflect logical structure has been a matter of theoretical debate. To test these competing ideas, participants (N = 3928) comple...

Explicit (directly measured) evaluations are widely assumed to be sensitive to logical structure. However, whether implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are uniquely sensitive to co-occurrence information or can also reflect logical structure has been a matter of theoretical debate. To test these competing ideas, participants (N = 3,928) compl...

Explicit (directly measured) evaluations are widely assumed to be sensitive to logical structure. However, whether implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are uniquely sensitive to co-occurrence information or can also reflect logical structure has been a matter of theoretical debate. To test these competing ideas, participants (N = 3,928) compl...

We highlight several sets of findings from the past decade elucidating the relationship between implicit social cognition and real-world inequality: studies focusing on practical ramifications of implicit social cognition in applied contexts, the relationship between implicit social cognition and consequential real-world outcomes at the level of in...

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel concept...

Over the past three decades, implicit social cognition research has flourished and has produced myriad novel insights into the automatic operation of social attitudes (evaluations) and stereotypes (beliefs). In this chapter, we provide an overview of what we regard to be significant and settled issues as well as the most pressing open questions tha...

Stereotypes are associations between social groups and semantic attributes that are widely shared within societies. The spoken and written language of a society affords a unique way to measure the magnitude and prevalence of these widely shared collective representations. Here, we used word embeddings to systematically quantify gender stereotypes i...

Moran et al. (2020) recently conducted a multi-lab registered replication of Olson and Fazio’s (2001) surveillance task study—an incidental learning procedure designed to establish evaluative conditioning (EC) effects in the absence of awareness. The potential for unaware attitude formation continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied dev...

Several dual-process theories of evaluative learning posit two distinct implicit (or automatic) and explicit (or controlled) evaluative learning processes. As such, one may like a person explicitly but simultaneously dislike them implicitly. Dissociations between direct measures (e.g., Likert scales), reflecting explicit evaluations, and indirect m...

Associative accounts suggest that implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are sensitive primarily to co-occurrence information (e.g., pairings of gorges with positive experiences) and are represented associatively (e.g., gorge–nice). By contrast, recent propositional accounts have argued that implicit evaluations are also responsive to relationa...

Explicit (directly measured) evaluations of moral agents reflect both the externally observable consequences of actions and inferences about the agent's hidden mental states: Negative outcomes without negative intent (e.g., someone getting killed accidentally) and negative intent without a negative outcome (e.g., a failed attempt to kill someone) a...

Associative accounts suggest that implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are sensitive primarily to co-occurrence information (e.g., pairings of gorges with positive experiences) and are represented associatively (e.g., GORGE–NICE). By contrast, recent propositional accounts have argued that implicit evaluations are also responsive to relationa...

Much of human thought, feeling, and behavior unfolds automatically. Indirect measures of cognition capture such processes by observing responding under corresponding conditions (e.g., lack of intention or control). The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one such measure. The IAT indexes the strength of association between categories such as "planes...

In evaluative conditioning (EC), a neutral conditioned stimulus acquires the valence of an intrinsically valenced unconditioned stimulus as a result of repeated pairings between the two. Evidence for EC in the absence of awareness of the pairings has been provided using the surveillance paradigm (Olson & Fazio, 2001). In this commentary, we report...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is one of the most widely-studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance-task (Olson & Fazio, 2001) is a highly cited EC paradigm, and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for EC effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretic...

Distinguishing between mere association and causation is crucial for successful interactions with the environment: Only causal, but not merely associated, stimuli allow humans to produce rewards and avoid punishments by intervening on causal systems. Accordingly, prior research has demonstrated that explicit (controlled) cognition represents causal...

Implicit evaluations (attitudes) are often described as resistant to change, especially when they were initially formed in a seemingly associative manner, such as via repeated evaluative pairings (REP), and new learning is created via propositional material, such as evaluative statements (ES). The present research (total N = 2,124) tested the respo...

From the earliest ages tested, children and adults show similar overall magnitudes of implicit attitudes towards various social groups. However, such consistency in attitude magnitude may obscure meaningful age‐related change in the ways that children (vs. adults) acquire implicit attitudes. This experiment investigated children's implicit attitude...

In the present report we provide a brief summary of the relationship between implicit and explicit measures of social cognition based on the meta-analytic database analyzed in more detail with respect to the relationship between measures of social cognition and measures of intergroup behavior by Kurdi et al. (2018). In the present analysis, a stati...

Evaluating stimuli along a good–bad dimension is a fundamental computation performed by the human mind. In recent decades, research has documented dissociations and associations between explicit (i.e., self-reported) and implicit (i.e., indirectly measured) forms of evaluations. However, it is unclear whether such dissociations arise from relativel...

When tested immediately, evaluative statements (ES; verbal information about upcoming categories and their positive/negative attributes) surprisingly shift implicit (IAT) attitudes more effectively than repeated evaluative pairings (REP; actual pairing of category members with positive/negative attributes). The present project (total N = 5,317) exp...

Intergroup attitudes (evaluations) are generalized valence attributions to social groups (e.g., white–bad/Asian–good), whereas intergroup beliefs (stereotypes) are specific trait attributions to social groups (e.g., white–dumb/Asian–smart). When explicit (self-report) measures are used, attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social group are o...

Using data from 217 research reports (N = 36,071, compared to 3,471 and 5,433 in previous meta-analyses), this meta-analysis investigated the conceptual and methodological conditions under which Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes, stereotypes, and identity correlate with criterion measures of intergroup behavior. We found signifi...

Using data from 217 research reports (N = 36,071, compared to 3,471 and 5,433 in previous meta-analyses), this meta-analysis investigated the conceptual and methodological conditions under which Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes, stereotypes, and identity correlate with criterion measures of intergroup behavior. We found signifi...

Three experiments (total N = 1,058) were conducted to investigate the relationship between memory accuracy and subjective confidence using thematic lists constructed on the basis of spontaneous accessibility, that is, the frequency with which items are spontaneously generated as category members. After memorizing lists of words and performing a dis...

Six experiments, involving a total of 6,492 participants, were conducted to investigate the relative effectiveness of repeated evaluative pairings (REP; exposure to category members paired with pleasant or unpleasant images), evaluative statements (ES; verbally signaling upcoming pairings without actual exposure), and their combination (ES + REP) i...

We introduce the Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS), an open-access online stimulus set containing 900 color images depicting a broad spectrum of themes, including humans, animals, objects, and scenes, along with normative ratings on two affective dimensions-valence (i.e., the degree of positive or negative affective response that the im...