We compared the psychometric qualities of seven indirect attitude measures across three attitude domains (race, politics, and self-esteem) with a large sample (
N
= 23,413). We compared the measures ...on internal consistency, sensitivity to known effects, relationships with indirect and direct measures of the same topic, the reliability and validity of single-category attitude measurement, their ability to detect meaningful variance among people with nonextreme attitudes, and their robustness to the exclusion of misbehaving or well-behaving participants. All seven indirect measures correlated with each other and with direct measures of the same topic. These relations were always weak for self-esteem, moderate for race, and strong for politics. This pattern suggests that some of the sources of variation in the reliability and predictive validity of the indirect measures is a function of the concepts rather than the methods. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Brief IAT (BIAT) showed the best overall psychometric quality, followed by the Go–No-Go association task, Single-Target IAT (ST-IAT), Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP), Sorting Paired Features task, and Evaluative Priming. The AMP showed a steep decline in its psychometric qualities when people with extreme attitude scores were removed. Single-category attitude scores computed for the IAT and BIAT showed good relationships with other attitude measures but no evidence of discriminant validity between paired categories. The other measures, especially the AMP and ST-IAT, showed better evidence for discriminant validity. These results inform us on the validity of the measures as attitude assessments, but do not speak to the implicitness of the measured constructs.
In this commentary, we welcome Schimmack’s reanalysis of Bar-Anan and Vianello’s multitrait multimethod (MTMM) data set, and we highlight some limitations of both the original and the secondary ...analyses. We note that when testing the fit of a confirmatory model to a data set, theoretical justifications for the choices of the measures to include in the model and how to construct the model improve the informational value of the results. We show that making different, theory-driven specification choices leads to different results and conclusions than those reported by Schimmack (this issue, p. 396). Therefore, Schimmack’s reanalyses of our data are insufficient to cast doubt on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a measure of automatic judgment. We note other reasons why the validation of the IAT is still incomplete but conclude that, currently, the IAT is the best available candidate for measuring automatic judgment at the person level.
Previous research found that when people are instructed to smile toward liked objects and show negative facial expressions toward disliked objects, their facial response is faster and more intense ...than when they are required to smile toward disliked objects and express negative facial response toward liked objects. The present research tested a technologically innovative indirect evaluation measure that was based on that finding. Participants completed an implicit association test (IAT)—a common indirect measure of evaluation, responding with their emotional facial expressions, rather than by pressing response keys. In two web studies, using emotional facial expression detection through a webcam, we found that the Facial Response IAT (FR-IAT) is a reliable and valid measure of evaluations, comparable to the keyboard IAT. Because facial responses provide more information than key responses, pursuing future improvements of the FR-IAT’s methodology, software, and data analysis is a promising direction for enhancing the quality of indirect evaluation measurement. The same methodology and technology may also enhance other indirect measures of evaluation and cognitive tests related to emotion and judgment.
Does strong gender identity help or harm one’s well-being? Previous research suggests that acceptance of one’s social group and feelings of belongingness to the group are positively related to ...well-being, regardless of the group’s social status. However, there are inconsistent findings about the relation between well-being and how central the group is to one’s identity (centrality), especially among disadvantaged groups (e.g., women). In Studies 1 to 10 (total N = 5,955), we clarified these relations by controlling for shared variance between distinct gender identity aspects. Acceptance and belongingness were positively related to a range of well-being variables. Centrality was negatively related to well-being. These results were consistent across genders. Studies 11 to 14 (total N = 2,380) found that the negative relation between gender centrality and well-being might be mediated by perceived pressure to conform to the masculine role among men and perceived gender inequality among women. These results uncover a burden of strong gender identity.
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most popular measures in psychological research. A lack of standardization across IATs has resulted in significant variability among stimuli used by ...researchers, including the positive and negative words used in evaluative IATs. Does the variability in attribute words in evaluative IATs produce unwanted variability in measurement quality across studies? The present work investigated the effect of evaluative stimuli across three studies using 13 IATs and over 60,000 participants. The 64 positive and negative words that we tested provided similar measurement quality. Further, measurement was satisfactory even in IATs that used only category labels as stimuli. These results suggest that common sense is probably a sufficient method for selection of evaluative stimuli in the IAT. For reasonable measurement quality, we recommend that researchers using evaluative IATs in English select words randomly from the set we tested in the present research.
Co‐occurrence of an object and affective stimuli does not always mean that the object and the stimuli are the same valence (e.g., false accusations that Richard is a crook). Contemporary theory ...posits that information about the (in)validity of co‐occurrence has stronger influence on deliberate than automatic evaluation. However, available evidence supports that hypothesis only when the (in)validity information is delayed. Further, the existing evidence is open to alternative methodological accounts. In six high‐powered experiments (total N = 1750), we modified previous procedures to minimize alternative explanations and examine whether delayed (in)validity information has a discrepant effect on automatic versus deliberate evaluation. Casting doubt on the generality of the hypothesis, we found more sensitivity of deliberate than automatic evaluation to delayed validity information only when automatic evaluation was measured with the Implicit Association Test and not with the evaluative priming task or the affective misattribution procedure.
The increasing prevalence of anti-fat bias in American society comes at a great cost to the health and well-being of people who are overweight or obese. A better understanding of the correlates of ...anti-fat bias would inform development of interventions for reducing anti-fat bias. Based on three theoretical perspectives, this study tested the relation between attitudes and beliefs about weight and anti-fat bias (implicit and explicit): (1) The belief that one is like people who are fat (social identity theory). (2) The belief that one can control her/his weight (attribution theory). And (3) the beliefs that most people prefer thin people and that weight is important (socio-cultural theory).
Participants were 66,799 volunteers (47,265 women, mean age of 27.88 ± 11.9 years) who completed the Thin-Fat Implicit Association Test on the Project Implicit website (https://implicit.harvard.edu/) during 2016. Explicit anti-fat bias and weight-related attitudes and beliefs were assessed by self-report. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to examine links between weight-related attitudes and beliefs and anti-fat bias.
All tested weight-related attitudes and beliefs were significantly (p < .001) correlated with explicit and implicit anti-fat bias, but some of the correlations were very weak. An examination of the relative contribution of the tested weight-related attitudes and beliefs to a model explaining anti-fat bias suggested that the strongest correlates of explicit anti-fat bias were the beliefs that weight was important (β = 0.194, p < .001), that most people prefer thin people (β = 0.177, p < .001), and that the respondent was like people who are fat (β = −0.180, p < .001).
The social-identity and socio-cultural theories may provide a stronger explanation for anti-fat bias relative to attribution theory. Future research could use longitudinal designs with more reliable measures in order to verify these cross-sectional findings.
•Explicit and Implicit anti fat bias can be explained by several theoretical models.•Social-identity theory's explanation of anti-fat bias is relatively strong.•Socio-cultural theory's explanation of anti-fat bias is also relatively strong.•Attribution theory's explanation of anti-fat bias is relatively weak.
We tested whether goals during the processing of evaluative information determine the relative sensitivity of automatic evaluation to the valence of co-occurring stimuli versus the relation between ...the target and the affective stimuli. For example, “Kindness is uncharacteristic of Phil” has Phil co-occurring with kindness, but the relation suggests that he is unkind. In Experiment 1 (N=1248), targets co-occurred with positive or negative behaviors that were characteristic or uncharacteristic of them. In Experiment 2 (N=185), the targets started or ended pleasant or unpleasant sounds. Thus, the valence that co-occurred with targets was sometimes the opposite of the targets' valence inferred from the relation. In both experiments, we found that automatic evaluation was more sensitive to relational than to co-occurrence information when participants were instructed to form impressions than when they were instructed to memorize co-occurrence. This suggests that processing goals moderate the effect of propositional versus associative information on automatic evaluation.
•Automatic evaluation can be sensitive to associative or propositional information.•We predicted that processing goals moderate that sensitivity.•We manipulate the goals during learning of co-occurrence and relational information.•A goal to form impression increased sensitivity to propositional information.•A goal to remember co-occurrence increased sensitivity to associative information.
Prior research has found that indirectly measured preference for White people over Black people is positively related to categorizing angry racially ambiguous faces as Black. This past work found no ...evidence that directly measured racial preferences predict this racial categorization bias (RCB), suggesting that the RCB could be a unique and easily administered tool for investigating automatic evaluation and validating automatic evaluation measures. In two studies (total N > 7,000), using structural equation models that account for error variance, multiple indirect evaluation measures were uniquely related to the RCB, thus bolstering their predictive validity. However, the RCB also correlated with self-reported evaluation, leaving psychologists without a robust, replicable outcome uniquely related to automatic evaluation. The lack of such an outcome hinders theoretical and practical progress in research on implicit social cognition.
According to construal level theory (
N. Liberman, Y. Trope, & E. Stephan, in press
;
Y. Trope & N. Liberman, 2003
), people use a more abstract, high construal level when judging, perceiving, and ...predicting more psychologically distal targets, and they judge more abstract targets as being more psychologically distal. The present research demonstrated that associations between more distance and higher level of construal also exist on a pure conceptual level. Eight experiments used the Implicit Association Test (IAT;
A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998
) to demonstrate an association between words related to construal level (low vs. high) and words related to four dimensions of distance (proximal vs. distal): temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. In addition to demonstrating an association between level of construal and psychological distance, these findings also corroborate the assumption that all 4 dimensions of psychological distance are related to level of construal in a similar way and support the notion that they all are forms of psychological distance.
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