An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an attribute. The 2 concepts appear in a 2-choice task (e.g., flower vs. insect names), and the attribute in a 2nd task (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words for an evaluation attribute). When instructions oblige highly associated categories (e.g., flower + pleasant) to share a response key, performance is faster than when less associated categories (e.g., insect + pleasant) share a key. This performance difference implicitly measures differential association of the 2 concepts with the attribute. In 3 experiments, the IAT was sensitive to (a) near-universal evaluative differences (e.g., flower vs. insect), (b) expected individual differences in evaluative associations (Japanese + pleasant vs. Korean + pleasant for Japanese vs. Korean subjects), and (c) consciously disavowed evaluative differences (Black + pleasant vs. White + pleasant for self-described unprejudiced White subjects).Consider a thought experiment. You are shown a series of male and female faces, to which you are to respond as rapidly as possible by saying "hello" if the face is male and "goodbye" if it is female. For a second task, you are shown a series of male and female names, to which you are to respond rapidly with ' 'hello" for male names and "goodbye" for female names. These discriminations are both designed to be easy--the faces and names are unambiguously male or female. For a final task you are asked to perform both of these discriminations alternately. That is, you are shown a series of alternating faces and names, and you are to say "hello" if the face or name is male and "goodbye" if the face or name is female. If you guess that this combined task will be easy, you are correct. Now imagine a small variation of the thought experiment. The first discrimination is the same ("hello" to male faces, "goodbye" to female faces), but the second is reversed ( "goodbye" to male names, "hello" to female names). As with the first experiment, each of these tasks, by itself, is easy. However, when you contemplate mixing the two tasks ("hello" to male face or female name and "goodbye" to female face or male name), you may suspect that this new combined task will be difficult. Unless you wish to make many errors, you will have to respond considerably more slowly than in the previous experiment.The expected difficulty of the experiment with the reversed Anthony G. Greenwald, Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L.K. Schwartz, Department of Psychology, University of Washington.This research was partially supported by Grant SBR-9422242 from the National Science Foundation and Grant MH 41328 from the National Institute of Mental Health. For comments on a draft of this article, the authors thank Mahzarin Banaji, Shelly Famham, Laurie Rudman, and Yuichi Shoda.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Anthony G. Greenwald, Department of Psychology, Box 351525, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1525. Electronic mail may be sent to agg@u....

Experiment 1 unexpectedly found sex differences in evaluative gender stereotypes (only men associated male with potency and only women associated female with warmth). Experiment 2 dramatically reduced sex differences in gender-potency judgments when measures were redesigned to avoid implying that potency was positive (the concepts, strong and weak, were represented by evaluatively matched words; e.g., destroy vs. feeble, loud vs. quiet, and mighty vs. gentle). Experiment 3 tested the hypothesis that these sex differences were in the service of self-esteem but found no correlation between own-gender-favorable stereotyping and implicit self-esteem. Rather, participants showed a correlation between linking self to the favorable potency trait and linking own gender to that trait. Experiment 4 confirmed the correlation between implicit self-concept and gender stereotype using the contrast between potency and warmth for the implicit stereotype measure. In concert, results suggest that people possess implicit gender stereotypes in self-favorable form because of the tendency to associate self with desirable traits.

Using the Implicit Association Test (IAT), recent experiments have demonstrated a strong and automatic positive evaluation of White Americans and a relatively negative evaluation of African Americans. Interpretations of this finding as revealing pro-White attitudes rest critically on tests of alternative interpretations, the most obvious one being perceivers' greater familiarity with stimuli representing White Americans. The reported experiment demonstrated that positive attributes were more strongly associated with White than Black Americans even when (a) pictures of equally unfamiliar Black and White individuals were used as stimuli and (b) differences in stimulus familiarity were statistically controlled. This experiment indicates that automatic race associations captured by the IAT are not compromised by stimulus familiarity, which in turn strengthens the conclusion that the IAT measures automatic evaluative associations.

No abstract

No abstract