New evidence of the impact of the unconscious @ SPSP

The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) had their 11^th annual meeting from January 28 to January 30 in Las Vegas NV. This is the premier conference for social psychology and gives a glimpse into the cutting-edge research on a wide variety of topics in social psychology. There were a variety of symposia related to the unconscious.
Particular topics included the role of “unconscious thought”, or distracting oneself from a decision instead of mulling it over or making a rash judgment. The consistent finding was that unconscious thought leads to better judgments. Also, the role of premeditation, or consciously deliberating the possible consequences of behavior before acting, in feelings of control of one’s behavior was considered.
The consistent finding was that premeditation impacted one’s feelings of control, even when the premeditation itself was not related to the actual outcome
One important discussion in terms of the ABA methodology was by Michael McCaslin and colleagues. They examined whether or not different measures of attitudes are uniquely sensitive to different types of attitudes. The results of their experiments were that some differences in implicit and explicit attitude measures occur because individuals are hesitant to report consciously inexplicable “gut feelings” toward certain attitude objects.
A couple of examples that we commonly run into when studying brands is the reluctance of consumers to call a soda “sexy” or a snack food “part of my self-image” or to say that they voted for a particular candidate because they were physically attractive. Automatic Brand Associations measure these attribute associations implicitly which allows us to get around these self-presentation biases by tapping into the “gut feelings” that people have but either can’t or won’t report in standard surveys.