Are we puppets on a string? Comparing the impact of contingency and validity on implicit and explicit evaluations.

Research has demonstrated that implicit and explicit evaluations of the same object can diverge. Explanations of such dissociations frequently appeal to dual-process theories, such that implicit evaluations are assumed to reflect object-valence contingencies independent of their perceived validity, whereas explicit evaluations reflect the perceived validity of object-valence contingencies. Although there is evidence supporting these assumptions, it remains unclear if dissociations can arise in situations in which object-valence contingencies are judged to be true or false during the learning of these contingencies. Challenging dual-process accounts that propose a simultaneous operation of two parallel learning mechanisms, results from three experiments showed that the perceived validity of evaluative information about social targets qualified both explicit and implicit evaluations when validity information was available immediately after the encoding of the valence information; however, delaying the presentation of validity information reduced its qualifying impact for implicit, but not explicit, evaluations.