Editorial: Implicit social cognition: malleability and change

Implicit attitudes have become a central construct in understanding social judgment and behavior, particularly through measures such as the Implicit Association Test. This editorial introduces a Research Topic that synthesizes contemporary evidence on the malleability of implicit attitudes and the conditions under which they can be influenced by contextual and intervention-based factors. Drawing on eight empirical contributions, the collection integrates findings from social, developmental, cognitive, and applied psychology to examine how implicit attitudes are shaped by social dynamics and experiential manipulations. The studies address a broad set of interventions, including perspective-taking, anxiety induction, virtual reality embodiment, parental socialization, individuation training, linguistic context, and mindfulness practices. Collectively, the findings underscore a recurring dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes, with several interventions reliably influencing explicit judgments while leaving implicit evaluations largely unchanged. Notable exceptions emerge in contexts involving embodied virtual reality and individuation training, which demonstrate potential for attenuating implicit biases under specific conditions. The linguistic cue studies further highlight how repeated exposure to biased language contexts may causally embed societal biases into cognition, emphasizing the role of everyday environments in sustaining implicit attitudes. Across contributions, methodological diversity and mixed results point to the complexity of altering implicit cognition and caution against overly general claims regarding intervention efficacy. The editorial concludes by outlining critical directions for future research, including the need for replication, larger and more diverse samples, and stronger links between laboratory-based interventions and real-world outcomes. Advancing this agenda is essential for developing theoretically grounded and practically effective strategies to reduce implicit bias and promote more equitable social practices.