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Implicit Cognition and the Social Unconscious

Wesleyan University, rsteele{at}wesleyan.edu

Jill G. Morawski

Wesleyan University, jmorawski{at}wesleyan.edu

Considerable work in social psychology has explained social phenomena in terms of individual mental processes, and researchers more recently have suggested that many of these intrapsychic processes transpired beyond the awareness of individual subjects. Through these extensive research programs the social recedes and the individual constitutes the locus of psychological activity; such studies thus affirm individual centered ideologies and policies while obscuring social processes and structures. The paradigm of implicit social cognition entails an example of how features of the social world are reconfigured and interpreted as psychological events of individuals. Critical reading of this paradigm both elucidates the technical, rhetorical and theoretical routines through which this relocation is made and shows how that empirical research actually demonstrates the social unconscious. Reappraisal of implicit social cognition research with its demonstrations of dynamic social processes affords supportive evidence for extant feminist studies of the unconscious social gender biases structuring cultural beliefs and practices.

Key Words: dynamic social processes • gender biases • implicit social • cognition • social unconscious

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 1, 37-54 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354302121003


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