How do indirect measures of evaluation work? Evaluating the inference of prejudice in the Implicit Association Test

Brendl, C Miguel; Markman, Arthur B; Messner, Claude (2001). How do indirect measures of evaluation work? Evaluating the inference of prejudice in the Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(5), pp. 760-773. American Psychological Association 10.1037/0022-3514.81.5.760

Text __ubnetapp02.unibe.ch_profile$_scherrer_Desktop_JPSP01.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (2MB) | Request a copy

There has been significant interest in indirect measures of attitudes like the Implicit Association Test (IAT), presumably because of the possibility of uncovering implicit prejudices. The authors derived a set of qualitative predictions for people's performance in the IAT on the basis of random walk models. These were supported in 3 experiments comparing clearly positive or negative categories to nonwords. They also provided evidence that participants shift their response criterion when doing the IAT. Because of these criterion shifts, a response pattern in the IAT can have multiple causes. Thus, it is not possible to infer a single cause (such as prejudice) from IAT results. A surprising additional result was that nonwords were treated as though they were evaluated more negatively than obviously negative items like insects, suggesting that low familiarity items may generate the pattern of data previously interpreted as evidence for implicit prejudice.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

3 since deposited on 03 Apr 2014
0 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item