Changing Our Implicit Minds: How, When, and Why Implicit Evaluations Can Be Rapidly Revised

How easily can our first impressions of others be updated when we learn new, contradictory evidence? We review recent work in the social cognition literature on the ways in which implicit evaluations can be updated in a durable and robust manner. These findings show that implicit evaluations of novel individuals can be revised when the new information is believable and diagnostic, and if it reinterprets the evaluative meaning of the original information. We discuss implications of this evidence for the degree to which evaluative memories can be updated, as well as new directions for theories of human evaluation and implicit cognition.