When you have already made up your mind, but you don't know it yet.

Starting from the basic claim of the Gawronski and Bodenhausen’s APE model, the aim of this essay was the detection of the role of implicit and explicit attitudes in decision making. The implicit and explicit attitudes of a group of participants about the enlargement of a USA military base in Vicenza were detected at Time 1 and one week later (time 2) using the ST-IAT, in the case of the implicit attitudes, and the answers to a survey, in the case of explicit attitudes. An intention of voting in favour of or against the enlargement was also registered (at Time 1 and Time 2). The data showed that when an attitude involves a choice, all of the components (implicit attitudes, explicit attitudes and behavioural intention) have to move in the same direction. We found that the explicit component of the attitude controls the judgment preservation and/or the judgment change in the case of a defined attitude about a specific object. This explicit component is also able to affect the implicit component of the attitude. Moreover, in the case of a not yet defined attitude, the implicit component of the attitude drives the judgement construction at the explicit level. Instead, the implicit attitudes, but not the explicit attitudes, measured at the Time 1 anticipated the subsequent choices of people who initially defined themselves as uncertain In other words, only the ST-IAT index at Time 1 predicted the change in the survey responses and the participants’ ST-IAT performances at Time 2.