Is Implicit Social Cognition Developmentally Stable? A Longitudinal Study

To examine whether implicit social cognition is developmentally stable or variable, this study investigated three primary types of implicit social cognition (self-esteem, the gender-science stereotype, and racial attitude) across 2 years in a sample of Chinese adolescents and emerging adults (N = 608; 56% female; 15- to 27-year-olds). Rank-order stability analyses indicated that implicit self-esteem and implicit racial attitude manifested low stability (r = .16, .19, respectively), whereas implicit gender-science stereotype was highly stable (r = .75). Latent change score model analyses showed that: (a) the mean level of implicit self-esteem decreased across the 2 years, whereas the mean levels of implicit gender-science stereotype and implicit racial attitude manifested no changes; (b) individual changes were heterogeneous for all the three types of implicit social cognition (while some of the participants manifested increasing tendencies, 15%-46%, the others exhibited decreasing tendencies); (c) 30% of participants manifested similar changes across the three types of implicit social cognition (either increasing or decreasing over time on all three), while the remaining participants exhibited distinct changes across them. Together, these findings indicate that, developmentally, implicit social cognition is variable but also stable, though the degree of variability and stability vary across individuals and domains.