CAN IMPLICIT ATTITUDES TOWARD OTHER COUNTRIES BE CHANGED?

We aimed to determine whether or not implicit attitudes toward other countries can be changed by priming with friend/enemy identification manipulations. Participants comprised 60 Chinese adult men whose implicit attitudes toward India and South Korea were measured with the Implicit Association Test (IAT). They were then randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups: pro-India, in which participants read a short article indicating that India was a friend and South Korea was an enemy, and pro-South Korea, in which the opposite primes were used. Participants then wrote a short paper to support the assigned identity, and completed the IAT a second time. Repeated measures analyses of variance of IAT effects revealed a significant interaction between test time and groups, showing that implicit attitudes had been significantly changed by the 2 identification primes.