Implicit and Explicit Age Stereotypes Assessed in the Same Contexts are Still Independent.

Objective: In a series of three studies (N = 187), we investigated the correlation between implicit and explicit age stereotypes, both of which were assessed in a context-dependent way.

Methods: To assess implicit age stereotypes, we presented combinations of age category and specific context information as primes in a lexical decision task (LDT) with age stereotypic attributes as targets (e.g., "An old person is passing the crosswalk." - "slow"). To assess explicit age stereotypes, stereotypic traits were rated for their fit with person descriptions containing the same category and context information as the implicit measure.

Results: Category effects for the priming and rating tasks emerged within relevant contexts, however, we found no correlations between these two indicators, despite the fact that the same contexts were provided for explicit and implicit assessment.

Conclusion: These findings indicate that implicit and explicit age stereotypes reflect independent belief systems that are activated under different operating conditions (automatic activation vs. controlled reasoning).