Believing Is Seeing: Fixation Duration Predicts Implicit Negative Attitudes

A prototypical finding of social cognition is that social experiences influence later performance even though those experiences are not introspectively available. Building on social cognition research on implicit attitudes, we evaluate whether ethnic category/attribute pairs influence eye movements during the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz 1998). Results show that fixation duration predicted implicit attitudes such that when the category/attribute pairs disconfirmed one's implicit negative attitude fixation duration toward that pair increased. The present research provides evidence that eye movements and implicit processes inherent in the IAT are more broadly connected than previously thought.