Awareness of Implicit Attitudes Revisited: A Meta-Analysis on Replications Across Samples and Settings

A long-standing debate in social psychology is whether the cognitions reflected on implicit measures are unconscious. Research by Hahn et al. (2014) has documented that people are able to predict the patterns of their results on Implicit Association Tests (IATs) towards five pairs of social groups prospectively. The present article presents a meta-analysis of 17 published and unpublished exact replication studies conducted by or in close supervision of the original author. Replicating Hahn et al., participants in all 17 studies were able to accurately predict the patterns of their IAT results (meta-analytical within-subject effect size: b = .44; corrected average within-subjects correlation r = .56). This prediction accuracy effect was smaller for online (b = .27; corrected r = .37) than lab (b = .47; corrected r = .61) studies, as well as for general-public (b = .27; corrected r = .36) as opposed to student samples (b = .47; corrected r = .60). Moreover, predictions fully explained implicit-explicit relations, and they seemed to reflect unique insights into participants’ own cognitions beyond mere knowledge about normatively expected patterns of implicit responses. This pattern of results remained the same across samples, settings, countries (Canada, US, and Germany), and languages (English vs. German). Further analyses suggested that lower prediction accuracy in online samples seems to partly reflect a suppression effect from higher consistency between traditional explicit evaluations and predictions. Controlling for explicit evaluations (which exerted a negative unique effect on IAT scores beyond IAT score predictions) reduced the difference between online and lab studies substantially. Together, the results strengthen the hypothesis that the cognitions reflected on implicit evaluations are largely accessible to conscious awareness.