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For the first time, research on implicit cognitive processes relevant for the understanding of addictive behaviors and their prevention or treatment is brought together in one volume! The Handbook of Implicit Cognition and Addiction features the work of an internationally renowned group of contributing North American and European authors who draw together developments in basic research on implicit cognition with recent developments in addiction research. Editors Reinout W. Wiers and Alan W. Stacy examine recent findings from a variety of disciplines including basic memory and experimental psychology, experimental psychopathology, emotion, and neurosciences.
What are Implicit Measures and Why are We Using Them?
What are Implicit Measures and Why are We Using Them?
Abstract: I argue that implicit measures are measurement outcomes that have certain functional properties. The expression “indirect measure,” however, refers to an objective property of the measurement procedure, being that the researcher does not assess the attitude on the basis of a self-assessment by the participant but on the basis of another behavior. With regard to the question of why one should use implicit measures, research suggests that they do not allow one to register stable structures in memory. It is also doubtful that they provide an index of implicit attitudes. But to the extent that implicit measures reflect the automatic impact of attitudes and cognitions, they could provide a unique insight into the effects of automatic processing on real-life behavior.
Introduction
For many years, psychologists have tried to measure attitudes and other cognitions in an attempt to understand, control, or predict human behavior. Most often, they have done so using questionnaires. More recently, there has been a growing interest in a new type of measures, often denoted “implicit” or “indirect” measures. Examples of such measures are the affective priming task (e.g., Fazio et al., 1995), the Implicit Association Test (IAT; e.g., Greenwald et al, 1998), the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST; e.g., De Houwer, 2003; De Houwer & Eelen, 1998), and the word association task (e.g., Stacy, 1997; see Fazio & Olson, 2003, for a review). Implicit measures such as these are now widely used in social psychology (e.g., Greenwald et al., 1998), clinical psychology (e.g., Teachman et al., 2001), personality psychology (e.g., Asendorpf et al., 2002), marketing (e.g., Brunei et al., in press), and health psychology (e.g., Stacy, 1997; Wiers et al., 2002). Despite their immense popularity, it is often not clear what terms such as “implicit measure,” “implicit attitude,” or “implicit cognition” refer to. In this chapter, I examine what it might mean to say that a measure is implicit or indirect and look at the possible benefits of using these measures. Although my analysis applies to all available implicit and indirect measures, I will focus primarily on reaction time measures such as the IAT and affective priming task simply because these are currently the most popular ones.
What are “Implicit” and “Indirect” Measures?
What are “Implicit Measures”?
Many researchers use the expression “implicit measures” and “indirect measures” to refer to a class of measures that are supposed to be in some way different from more traditional questionnaire measures. But what is unique about these measures? What does it mean to say that a measure is implicit or indirect? To answer this question, it is important to realize that the term “measure” can be used in different ways. It can either be used to refer to the outcome of a measurement procedure (e.g., a particular score on a questionnaire or a particular pattern of performance such as an IAT or priming effect) or to the objective measurement procedure itself (e.g., the questionnaire itself as consisting of certain instructions and certain questions or the exact instructions and stimuli that are presented during a reaction time task). A measurement procedure can be called a measure in the sense that it can in principle be used to obtain an outcome that provides an index of a construct or entity. For example, putting someone on a scale is a measure of weight in the sense that it is a procedure one can follow to obtain an estimate of someone's weight. The number provided by the scale is the outcome of the measurement procedure. This outcome can be called a measure of weight in that it is an estimate of the actual weight of the person. For an outcome to reflect a construct or entity (such as an attitude or weight), it must somehow be (partially) produced or determined by the construct or entity. In other words, there are some underlying processes through which the construct or entity produces or determines the outcome of the measurement procedure (e.g., the processes by which the weight of the person is translated into a value on the scale).
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