Using Implicit Association Tests for the Assessment of Implicit Personality Self-Concept

Using Implicit Association Tests for the Assessment of Implicit Personality Self-Concept

Psychologists have long suspected that people do not have good access to their own thoughts and feelings and that self-exploration is subject to introspective limits. Empirical evidence supports this view (e.g. Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). What results is a compelling claim for measurement procedures suitable for the assessment of cognitive processes that remain obscured if people are simply asked to report them. Recently, social cognition research has made progress towards the development of such ‘implicit’ procedures. This chapter deals with a most prominent class of implicit procedures, the Implicit Association Tests (IATs) (Greenwald et al., 1998), and reviews theoretical and empirical contributions that explored IATs for the assessment of the personality self-concept.

Although the term ‘implicit’ was criticized because it left unclear whether it described the measure or the construct, we retain this term that is now firmly entrenched in the literature. Originally, ‘implicit’ was intended to be a label for the measure. In this chapter, we consider both aspects and refer to the implicit personality self-concept at the construct level and to features of the measurement procedure (e.g. unawareness or fakability) at the empirical level. Also, we refer to IAT measures in plural to indicate that they represent different applications of a general procedure rather than one specific test.

The chapter is organized into four main parts. The first section is devoted to the conceptualization of the explicit and the implicit personality self-concept. Following this, we describe essential characteristics of IAT procedures and discuss different theoretical accounts for IAT effects. The third section presents the psychometric properties of IATs including their reliability and their ability to predict criterion variance unpredicted by self-report measures (incremental validity). The section also discusses the extent to which IATs meet the demands of individual diagnosis. In the final section, we describe alternatives to IAT measures along with their advantages and disadvantages over the IATs and offer an outlook to future research.