Gap between conscious and unconscious attitudes

Filip Olsson’s thesis “Culture and implicit cognition: On the preconscious nature of nationalism and prejudice” explores perceptions of minority groups and nationalism. The thesis consists of three studies, which reveal a significant gap between conscious and unconscious attitudes.

The first study focuses on perceptions of Muslims before and after three terrorist attacks in France. Initially, the study found that the conscious attitudes did not change at all, which is in line with previous research.

Filip Olsson was surprised by this result and thus he decided to investigate unconscious biases. And there he observed a clear shift in attitudes – the study participants' spontaneous reactions to Muslim characteristics became more negative after the attacks. The change occurred not only in France but also globally.

Cause and effect

The study was possible thanks to available data from the time before the attacks that no one had used. This gave Filip Olsson the opportunity to perform a prejudice test on the same participant afterwards.

“When you use existing data in this way, it is called natural experiment. And then we can talk about cause and effect. Because it's not like in a survey study where you only see correlation without knowing if there is causality”, says Filip Olsson.

Filip Olsson. Photo: Elida Izani Binti Ibrahim

Although the change in attitudes was significant, it persisted for a relatively short period of time. After about three weeks, prejudice went back to previous levels.

A similar result has also been shown in the dissertation's second study. There, Filip Olsson investigated how the football World Cup affects unconscious nationalism. The study finds that people's automatic thoughts about the nation become more positive when their team won and more negative when they lost. Also in this case, the attitude change was short-lived.

Narrow perception of Swedishness

The third study focuses on attitudes towards minorities in Sweden. Filip Olsson investigated the participants' perception of Swedish-born people with a background in Finland, Norway, Syria and Bosnia. The question he asked was: How Swedish is this person according to you? The participants answered that everyone is equally Swedish.

“This does not agree with how minorities experience it in Sweden. And when I used the more unconscious measures then the ethnic hierarchies emerged. There are differences in how Swedishness is perceived and which groups are recognised as the real Swedes.”

The tests that measure unconscious attitudes showed that the participants perceive only people with a background in Norway as Swedish. Those with a Finnish background are perceived as neither Swedish nor foreign. And those with a Bosnian and Syrian background are perceived as foreigners.

The consequences of the unconscious prejudices

Filip Olsson believes that the unconscious prejudices can have a negative impact on how people with minority backgrounds are treated in society. And when there is a gap between conscious and unconscious prejudice, it can lead to us denying minorities' experience of discrimination.

“Studies in the USA have shown that these types of automatic responses, or unconscious attitudes, have consequences for discrimination in the labor market. They have consequences for the health care you receive, how teachers treat you at school, how your assignments are assessed. There is a great deal of research that shows that this particular type of spontaneous reactions has very large consequences for behaviour. And sometimes greater consequences than conscious attitudes have”, says Filip Olsson.

The overall question that Filip Olsson's thesis aims to answer is where the automatic gut feeling comes from. Is it a natural response to the world or is it socially constructed?

“The conclusion that I have come to is that a lot depends on the society we live in. If our surroundings systematically portray groups in a certain way, we will have an automatic response towards those groups”, says Filip Olsson.

The thesis

The thesis “Culture and implicit cognition: On the preconscious nature of nationalism and prejudice” is available in DiVA