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Implicit Association Test (IAT)

The idea that human thinking and feeling can operate outside conscious awareness and without conscious control is well established. Researchers arrived at this conclusion less from complex theorizing about the nature of the mind than from evidence generated by several unique methods. This evidence revealed that much of social cognition occurs without conscious awareness, control, intentional thought, or self-reflection. Thus implicit forms of preference of both individuals and social groups have come to form a critical component in the understanding of intergroup relations.

One method that contributes to this understanding is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT is a measure of implicit cognition, assessing the relative strength of a associations between semantic concepts that may not be consciously accessible. For example, the IAT might provide evidence that, in the person being tested, the category “woman” is associated more with family than with career, while the category “man” reveals the opposite association. Indeed, the presence of such associations can be detected by the IAT even if the person is not aware of them or if the person consciously endorses an opposing belief.

The IAT has been used to study a diverse range of psychological concepts, and its primary use has been in the analysis of unconscious intergroup attitudes and stereotypes and group identity. Notably, the IAT has been used to study many aspects of implicit intergroup cognition, including its relationship to self-report, its development, neural correlates, and ecologically realistic behaviors.

Description of the Method

The IAT is a computer-based reaction-time task that measures the relative strength of associations between concept-attribute pairs by instructing participants to classify four sets of stimuli into two superordinate categories using just two response keys. During a typical IAT, participants use two response keys to classify concept stimuli presented sequentially on a computer screen (e.g., faces of Blacks and Whites, representing the concept race); for example, pressing the left key to indicate the face is Black and the right key to indicate the face is White. In addition, participants use the same two keys to classify attribute stimuli (e.g., good words such as happy, nice, pleasant or bad words such as terrible, awful, violent).

For half the trials, a particular concept category (White) and attribute category (good) share the same response key, while the contrasting categories share the other response key. And for the second half of the trials, the pairings reverse so that the opposite categories share the same response key (Black with good, and White with bad). The logic of the IAT is simple: When two concepts are more strongly associated with each other, it should be easier for participants to classify them when they share the same response key than when they share different response keys. In other words, participants should be both faster to respond and more accurate when two closely related concepts share the same response key.

The IAT stimuli can appear in several formats, including pictures and words presented either visually or aurally. Response latencies and errors are recorded and compared to those generated by the first set of trials. The particular pairings described above are counterbalanced across participants to control for potential order effects. (For a sample IAT task, visit http://implicit.harvard.edu)

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