Dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes towards the rich in a developing country: The case of China

In developing countries in which the gap between the rich and the poor is wide, we hypothesized a dissociation between people's implicit and explicit attitudes towards the rich. We tested this hypothesis in China, the world's largest emerging economy. As predicted, Chinese participants exhibited a negative attitude towards the rich in responding to a questionnaire which measured their explicit attitude. In contrast, when an implicit measure was used, they were found to hold a positive attitude towards the rich. In addition, the correlation between the explicit and implicit measures was not significant.