Chinese people’s explicit and implicit attitudes toward rural left-behind elderly in the context of traditional-modern culture conflicts

This study examined Chinese people’s explicit and implicit attitudes to rural
left-behind elderly (RLBE) in the context of traditional-modern culture conflicts
and inferred Chinese people’s explicit and implicit attitude change to
seniors, rurality and filial piety according to the Traditional-Modern Theory of
Attitude Change. Participants were 661 Chinese residents aged between 17
and 59 randomly assigned to answer questions about one of three target
groups: elderly, rural elderly and RLBE. Explicit attitudes were measured by
asking participants to provide five adjectives they could think of about the
target group. Implicit attitudes were measured by adopting the stereotypic
explanatory bias paradigm. Results suggested that explicitly, the more
important a traditional concept is, the less the attitude toward it may change.
in a modern direction; implicitly, all traditional concepts were changing in
a modern direction, affected by modern individualistic western-influenced
cultural ideas. The study developed a paradigm to study attitudes of multi-identity groups and extended the traditional-modern attitude change theory
to implicit attitudes.