Mere acceptance produces apparent attitude in the Implicit Association Test

Two experiments examined mere acceptance effects in the Implicit Association Test (IAT). They tested whether accepting a stimulus as conforming to a rule produces responding consistent with positive attitude in the IAT. In Experiment 1, accepted stimuli were more easily categorized with pleasant personality characteristics than rejected stimuli; they were preferred according to the logic of the IAT. Accepted word stimuli were also responded to faster overall, suggesting that it was easier to make the accept than the reject response. In Experiment 2, numerical stimuli that conformed to a rule showed the same IAT preference effect over non-confirming stimuli, even when the rule conforming stimuli were more difficult to categorize. Three sources of this apparent preference for rule-conforming stimuli are considered: (1) the semantic relatedness of the concepts “accept” and “pleasant” on the one hand, and “reject” and “unpleasant” on the other; (2) that rejected non-category members are more salient (‘pop-out’) and thus are more easily categorized with the more salient unpleasant personality characteristics; or (3) that accepting rule-conforming stimuli is experienced as a pleasant event. Regardless of the mechanism underlying the mere acceptance effect, the IAT can produce apparent preferences for stimuli towards which participants have no positive attitude.