How andWhy Implicit Attitudes Should Affect Voting

Thisarticle provides a foundation for understanding the role of implicit biases in political behavior, particularly implicit racial attitudes and voting behavior. Although racial attitudes have rarely played a major direct role in American presidential politics until 2008, numerous local, state, and federal elections are held every year in the United States that involve minority candidates. As a result, the implications are considerable. This article connects the cognitive psychological science of memory—specifically implicit memory—to the social psychological study of implicit attitudes, stereotyping, and prejudice, and then to political psychology. The overwhelming evidence from cognitive psychology that memory is associative, and that it can and does operate (i.e., gets stored and retrieved) outside of conscious awareness and control, paired with the social psychological insight that memory activation is influential in person perception, provides the strong theoretical foundation for expecting implicit biases to uniquely predict part of electoral behavior. The social and political psychological extensions of implicit memory to interpersonal and intergroup judgments are theoretically uncontroversial and methodologically rigorous.