Can Multilingualism Deter the Effect of Implicit Misleading Cues?

73 COPYRIGHT 2011 BY PSI CHI, THE INTERNATIONAL HONOR SOCIETY IN PSYCHOLOGY (VOL. 16, NO. 2/ISSN 1089-4136) *Faculty mentors Automated systems for judging the world have evolved over the course of evolutionary history. Previous studies have shown that unconscious processes may be adaptive under many circumstances (for a recent review see Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010); however, they can equally be inaccurate and, instead of promoting survival, lead to prejudice. An example of an implicit assumption, and the one used in this study, is that the concept of family is more closely related to women than to men, and that men, on the other hand, are schematically associated to the concept of career (Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002). To a certain point, the findings of social psychology support these preconceptions. Research has shown that women’s connections as mothers, daughters, sisters, and grandmothers bind families (Rossi & Rossi, 1990) and that women spend more time caring for both preschoolers and aging parents (Eagly & Crowley, 1986). For women especially, a sense of mutual support is crucial to marital satisfaction (Acitelli & Antonucci, 1994). On the other hand, in conversation, men’s style reflects their concern for independence. Men are more likely than women to act as powerful people often do: talking assertively, interrupting intrusively, touching, staring more, and smiling less (Anderson & Leaper, 1998). Although the research cited supports the bias that people show in associating women with family and men with careers, most people in the 21st century (especially young college students) deny that they think in this fashion when probed explicitly (Nosek et al., 2002). Now, findings show that implicit and explicit attitudes belong to distinct dimensions of cognition and therefore can differ (Hofmann, Gawronski, Gschwendner, Le, & Schmitt, 2005). Wilson’s theory on dual attitudes affirms that even though explicit attitudes may vary, implicit attitudes, such as old habits, change more slowly (Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). In the last decade, the field of personality measurement assessment has developed procedures that are free from the limits of explicit questionnaire measures and that are suitable for the assessment of implicit self-representations. Chronometric procedures, such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995), are examples of such techniques. ABSTRACT. Multilinguals appear better able than monolinguals to suppress implicit misleading cues that lead to misguided associations. This study induced participants (N = 108), weakly and strongly, to misguided association. The hypothesis of the experiment was that monolinguals and multilinguals would not differ in the amount of misguided associations expressed when stimuli induced misguided association weakly, through priming, but that they would differ (multilinguals showing fewer) when it induced associations strongly (through the IAT). The results confirmed the hypothesis, providing evidence for the conjecture that multilingualism does deter the effect of implicit misleading cues. Because of the quasi-experimental nature of this study, its conclusions remain open to further examination. Can Multilingualism Deter the Effect of Implicit Misleading Cues? Jean-Paul Noel Gustavus Adolphus College