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.