Measuring task-switching ability in the Implicit Association Test

Recently, the role of method-specific variance in the Implicit Association Test (IAT) was examined (McFarland & Crouch, 2002; Mierke & Klauer, 2003). This article presents a new content-unspecific control task for the assessment of task-switching ability within the IAT methodology. Study 1 showed that this task exhibited good internal consistency and stability. Studies 2-4 examined method-specific variance in the IAT and showed that the control task is significantly associated with conventionally scored IAT effects of the IAT-Anxiety. Using the D measures proposed by Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji (2003), the amount of method-specific variance in the IAT-Anxiety could be reduced. Possible directions for future research are outlined.     

Using the implicit association test to measure age differences in implicit social cognitions

Two studies investigated the use of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998) to study age differences in implicit social cognitions. Study I collected IAT (implicit) and explicit (self-report) measures of age attitudes, age identity, and self-esteem from young, young-old, and old-old participants. Study 2 collected IAT and explicit measures of attitudes toward flowers versus insects from young and old participants. Results show that the IAT provided theoretically meaningful insights into age differences in social cognitions that the explicit measures did not, supporting the value of the IAT in aging research. Results also illustrate that age-related slowing must be considered in analysis and interpretation of IAT measures.     

Reducing the influence of extrapersonal associations on the Implicit Association Test: personalizing the IAT

The authors argue that the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A.G. Greenwald, D.E. McGhee, & J.L.K. Schwartz, 1998) can be contaminated by associations that do not contribute to one's evaluation of an attitude object and thus do not become activated when one encounters the object but that are nevertheless available in memory. The authors propose a variant of the IAT that reduces the contamination of these "extrapersonal associations." Consistent with the notion that the traditional version of the IAT is affected by society's negative portrayal of minority groups, the "personalized" IAT revealed relatively less racial prejudice among Whites in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiments 3 and 4, the personalized IAT correlated more strongly with explicit measures of attitudes and behavioral intentions than did the traditional IAT. The feasibility of disentangling personal and extrapersonal associations is discussed.     

Does substance use affect reliabilities of the Implicit Association Test?

The authors examined whether use of alcohol or marijuana affected reliability of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998). Consistent with research indicating the possibility that marijuana use depletes cognitive resources, the authors found worse reliabilities for participants who recently used marijuana than for those who had not. Recent alcohol users and nonusers demonstrated similar IAT reliability. Subsequent analyses indicated that reliability differences between marijuana users and nonusers were most pronounced when participants began with incongruous tasks and then switched to congruous tasks. Results were consistent with work on the residual costs of task switching that indicates that effortful tasks promote interference with tasks that follow. The authors discussed results in terms of IAT scoring procedures and the prevalence of use of alcohol and marijuana on university campuses.     

Using the implicit association test to measure self-esteem and self-concept

Experiment 1 used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998) to measure self-esteem by assessing automatic associations of self with positive or negative valence. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that two IAT measures defined a factor that was distinct from, but weakly correlated with, a factor defined by standard explicit (self-report) measures of self-esteem. Experiment 2 tested known-groups validity of two IAT gender self-concept measures. Compared with well-established explicit measures, the IAT measures revealed triple the difference in measured masculinity-femininity between men and women. Again, CFA revealed construct divergence between implicit and explicit measures. Experiment 3 assessed the self-esteem IAT's validity in predicting cognitive reactions to success and failure. High implicit self-esteem was associated in the predicted fashion with buffering against adverse effects of failure on two of four measures.     

A unified theory of implicit attitudes, stereotypes, self-esteem, and self-concept

This theoretical integration of social psychology's main cognitive and affective constructs was shaped by 3 influences: (a) recent widespread interest in automatic and implicit cognition, (b) development of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz. 1998), and (c) social psychology's consistency theories of the 1950s, especially F. Heider's (1958) balance theory. The balanced identity design is introduced as a method to test correlational predictions of the theory. Data obtained with this method revealed that predicted consistency patterns were strongly apparent in the data for implicit (IAT) measures but not in those for parallel explicit (self-report) measures. Two additional not-yet-tested predictions of the theory are described.     

Validity of the salience asymmetry interpretation of the implicit association test: comment on Rothermund and Wentura (2004)

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) requires responding to category contrasts such as young versus old, male versus female, and pleasant versus unpleasant. In introducing the IAT, A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, and J. L. K. Schwartz (1998) proposed that IAT measures reflect mental structures involving the nominal features of the IAT's categories (e.g., age, gender, or valence features). In contrast, K. Rothermund and D. Wentura proposed that IAT performance is dominated by salience asymmetries of the IAT's pairs of contrasted categories. To assess relative contributions of nominal feature contrasts versus salience asymmetries, the authors (a) briefly summarize the extensive evidence now available to support construct validity of the IAT as a measure based on nominal category features and (b) present 2 new experiments that yielded results problematic for the salience asymmetry interpretation.     

Two bases of the compatibility effect in the Implicit Association Test (IAT)

Four experiments are reported, investigating the mechanisms underlying the compatibility effect in the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). All experiments involved two IATs: flower IAT, in which the target categories were flowers and insects, and number IAT, involving even and odd numbers as target categories. In Experiment 1, using the standard IAT procedure, the two IATs produced equal IAT effects, despite large differences in rated valence contrast between flowers and insects and between even and odd numbers. Experiment 2 used a procedure developed by Klauer and Mierke (2005) and produced results consistent with the view that valence plays a role in the flower IAT but not in the number IAT. Experiments 3 and 4 used manipulations similar to those developed by Rothermund and Wentura (2004) and showed that these manipulations affected the flower IAT and number IAT differently. The results provide converging evidence that the two types of IAT effects—one based on valence and one based on familiarity—are empirically dissociable.     

Implicit associations between smoking and social consequences among smokers in cessation treatment

Explicit expectations of the negative and positive social consequences of smoking are likely to have substantial influence on decisions regarding smoking. However, among smokers trying to quit, success in smoking cessation may be related not only to the content of expectancies about smoking's social effects but also to the ease with which these cognitive contents come to mind when confronted with smoking stimuli. To examine this possibility, we used the implicit association test (IAT) [Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480] to assess implicit cognitive associations between smoking and negative vs. positive social consequences among 67 heavy social drinkers seeking smoking cessation treatment in a randomized clinical trial. Results showed that the relative strength of implicit, negative, social associations with smoking at baseline predicted higher odds of smoking abstinence during treatment over and above the effects of relevant explicit measures. The only variable that significantly correlated with IAT scores was the density of smokers in participants' social environment; those with more smoking in their social environment showed weaker negative social associations with smoking. Results suggest implicit cognition regarding the social consequences of smoking may be a relevant predictor of smoking cessation outcome.     

Employing automatic approach and avoidance tendencies for the assessment of implicit personality self-concept: The implicit association procedure (IAP)

A new chronometric procedure, the Implicit Association Procedure (IAP), was adapted to assess the implicit personality self-concept of shyness. A sample of 300 participants completed a shyness-inducing role play and, before or after the role play, a shyness IAP, a shyness Implicit Association Test (IAT), and direct self-ratings. The experimental group was instructed to fake nonshyness. The control group did not receive this instruction. IAT and IAP were unaffected by position effects, and were less susceptible to faking than direct self-ratings with regard to mean levels and correlates. Under faking, correlations between direct and indirect measures decreased, and direct but not indirect measures showed higher correlations with social desirability and lower correlations with observed shyness. Despite many similarities, the true correlation between IAT and IAP was estimated only .61, indicating high method-specific variance in both procedures. The findings suggest that indirect measures are more robust against faking than traditional self-ratings but do not yet meet psychometric criteria for practical assessment purposes.     

Do features of stimuli influence IAT effects?

The Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) is a categorization task intended to measure the strength of associations between concepts. The present research investigated the influence of individual stimuli on IAT effects. Exploring implicit attitudes of East and West Germans, we systematically manipulated relatedness of target stimuli to the attribute dimension and, simultaneously, relatedness of attribute stimuli to the target dimension. Two experiments demonstrate the influence of stimulus associations as one source that drives IAT effects. Depending on the strength and the direction of these cross-category associations, the result was either stronger IAT effects or a decline of IAT effects. Implications for theoretical models as well as for the interpretation of IAT effects are discussed.     

Implicit and explicit alcohol-related cognitions in heavy and light drinkers

Implicit and explicit alcohol-related cognitions were measured in 2 dimensions: positive-negative (valence) and arousal-sedation, with 2 versions of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. Schwartz) and related explicit measures. Heavy drinkers (n = 24) strongly associated alcohol with arousal on the arousal IAT (especially men) and scored higher on explicit arousal expectancies than light drinkers (n = 24). On the valence IAT, both light and heavy drinkers showed strong negative implicit associations with alcohol that contrasted with their positive explicit judgments (heavy drinkers were more positive). Implicit and explicit cognitions uniquely contributed to the prediction of 1-month prospective drinking. Heavy drinkers' implicit arousal associations could reflect the sensitized psychomotor-activating response to drug cues, a motivational mechanism hypothesized to underlie the etiology of addictive behaviors.     

The power of a story: New,automatic associations from a single reading of a short scenario

The implicit association test (IAT) is typically used to assess nonconscious categorization judgments that are “under control of automatically activated evaluation” (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998, p. 1464) and that are usually considered independent of explicit judgments. The present study builds on recent work suggesting evidence of short-term modifiability of the IAT effect. Specifically, we show that reading a short text that describes a novel, fictional scenario, within which the to-be-evaluated categories are embedded, can produce substantial and immediate modulations of the IAT effect. This modulation effect does not occur when subjects are simply instructed to think about counterstereotypical associations (Experiment 1A and 1B). In Experiment 2, we use a variant of the IAT to show that scenario modulation cannot be explained in terms of strategic criterion shifts. These results suggest that a newly acquired knowledge structure targeting the abstract, category level can produce behavioral effects typically associated with automatic categorization.     

Greenwald提出的内隐联想测验介绍

内隐联想测验(Implicit Association Test,简称IAT)是Greenwald等于1998年提出的一种新的内隐社会认知的研究方法,其采用的是一种计算机化的辨别分类任务,以反应时为指标,通过对概念词和属性词之间的自动化联系的评估进而来对个体的内隐态度等进行间接测量。该文先对内隐联想测验的由来、原理进行了介绍,再从性能及应用两方面对已有的相关研究进行了归纳、整理和论述。最后,通过分析指出该方法符合现代心理测量学的最新发展方向,将有着强大的生命力。     

Understanding and using the implicit association test: I. An improved scoring algorithm

In reporting Implicit Association Test (IAT) results, researchers have most often used scoring conventions described in the first publication of the IAT (A.G. Greenwald, D.E. McGhee, & J.L.K. Schwartz, 1998). Demonstration IATs available on the Internet have produced large data sets that were used in the current article to evaluate alternative scoring procedures. Candidate new algorithms were examined in terms of their (a) correlations with parallel self-report measures, (b) resistance to an artifact associated with speed of responding, (c) internal consistency, (d) sensitivity to known influences on IAT measures, and (e) resistance to known procedural influences. The best-performing measure incorporates data from the IAT's practice trials, uses a metric that is calibrated by each respondent's latency variability, and includes a latency penalty for errors. This new algorithm strongly outperforms the earlier (conventional) procedure.     

Two bases of the compatibility effect in the Implicit Association Test (IAT)

Four experiments are reported, investigating the mechanisms underlying the compatibility effect in the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). All experiments involved two IATs: flower IAT, in which the target categories were flowers and insects, and number IAT, involving even and odd numbers as target categories. In Experiment 1, using the standard IAT procedure, the two IATs produced equal IAT effects, despite large differences in rated valence contrast between flowers and insects and between even and odd numbers. Experiment 2 used a procedure developed by Klauer and Mierke (2005) and produced results consistent with the view that valence plays a role in the flower IAT but not in the number IAT. Experiments 3 and 4 used manipulations similar to those developed by Rothermund and Wentura (2004) and showed that these manipulations affected the flower IAT and number IAT differently. The results provide converging evidence that the two types of IAT effects-one based on valence and one based on familiarity-are empirically dissociable.Experiments 1and 2 reported in this paper were conducted as an honours project by Marie Peek-O'Leary under the supervision of Sachiko Kinoshita. Parts of this paper were presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society held in Vancouver, Canada, in November, 2003.     

Drinking without thinking: an implicit measure of alcohol motivation predicts failure to control alcohol use

Addiction is characterized by dyscontrol - substance use despite intentions to restrain. Using a sample of at-risk drinkers, the present study examined whether an implicit measure of alcohol motivation (the Implicit Association Test [IAT]; Greenwald, A.G., McGhee, D.E., & Schwartz, J.L.K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480) would predict dyscontrol of alcohol use. Participants completed an IAT and, to elicit motivation to restrain alcohol use, were instructed that greater consumption in a taste test would impair performance on a later task for which they could win a prize. All participants viewed aversive slides and then completed a thought-listing task. Participants either exerted self-control by suppressing negative affect and thoughts regarding the slides or did not exert self-control. Post-manipulation, the groups did not differ in mood, urge to drink or motivation to restrain consumption. During the subsequent taste test, participants whose self-control resources were depleted consumed more alcohol than did those in the control group. Additionally, the IAT, but not an explicit measure of alcohol motivation, more strongly predicted alcohol use when self-control resources were depleted. The results indicate that the IAT may have utility in predicting dyscontrolled alcohol use.     

Process components of the Implicit Association Test: a diffusion-model analysis

The authors present a diffusion-model analysis of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In Study 1, the IAT effect was decomposed into 3 dissociable components: Relative to the compatible phase, (a) ease and speed of information accumulation are lowered in the incompatible phase, (b) more cautious speed-accuracy settings are adopted, and (c) nondecision components of processing require more time. Studies 2 and 3 assessed the nature of interindividual differences in these components. Construct-specific variance in the IAT relating to the construct to be measured (such as implicit attitudes) was concentrated in the compatibility effect on information accumulation (Studies 2 and 3), whereas systematic method variance in the IAT was mapped on differential speed-accuracy settings (Study 3). Implications of these dissociations for process theories of the IAT and for applications are discussed.