Narrowing down to the automatically activated attitude: A narrowed conceptual scope improves correspondence between implicitly and explicitly measured attitudes

People display a remarkable ability to focus either broadly or narrowly on their internal mental landscape. This project examined if such shifts in conceptual attention regulated correspondence between implicit and explicit measures of attitudes. Because a broadened conceptual focus should cause the mind to be awash in a rather disparate assortment of attitude-relevant material that all needs to be integrated, this was predicted to dilute the impact of activated attitudes, as estimated by the implicit measure, on explicit reports of attitudes. Because a narrowed conceptual focus should cause only the most accessible attitude-relevant material (i.e., the activated attitude) to enter the mind, this was predicted to maximize the impact of such attitudes on explicit reports of attitudes. These predictions were subjected to empirical scrutiny and confirmed in three experiments that employed two different manipulations of conceptual scope, two different attitude objects, and two different implicit measures of attitudes.